So, one more shockingly dead-boring post about redoing the basement stuff: the schedule of activities!
Saturda
No, wait, we can go back farther than that.
Thursday, June 5th
Jackie brings home a large, custom-built shelf unit.
The problem: it’s custom built for a store that’s currently going out of business, not for our house. Further, said shelf unit is comprised of forty-eight thousand individual pieces of wood, all of which must be stacked in the basement. All but two of these pieces have nails sticking out of them that are each ~7.5 inches long. This is worrisome.
Friday, June 6th
I’m not at home and things do not progress.
Saturday, June 7th
As part of our (HA!) plan, we cut away the approximately 3 foot-wide strip of carpet that stretches from the base of the stairs along the wall — the strip I’ve simply dubbed “cat-piss alley” for the sake of brevity. This is a high-traffic area (even discounting the name above), and we plan to put down something that supports that sort of activity while simultaneously removing the corrupted carpeting. Jackie also points out that the shelf unit, when assembled, will fill along this wall very nicely. I’m non-plussed by this, since I think it’s going to crowd the base of the stairs a bit.
Somewhere along the way, we decide that we’re just going to cut out the carpet for this end of the room and make it a truly different room entirely. I should, at this point, explain that the main room of the basement takes up fully half of the whole basement and is, thus, huge. It is divided roughly into thirds by two load-bearing posts that break up the otherwise wide open space. At the end farthest from the stairs, we have a large table and a big closet to store games in and stuff. The center portion of the room contains a big sectional couch facing a big television — this area is all-prewired in the walls for surround sound, but we’re lazy about getting on with such things, even though I’m a complete geek.
The final third, that are nearest the stairs, is basically unused — we’d slotted it for some sort of reading space, with shelves. Hence, this project.
Jackie and I go looking for flooring and come up against a number of the problems I’ve already mentioned here. We settle on the solution that gets the job done without leaving us unable to make the house payment.
Sunday, June 8th
While I’m at Bencon, Jackie tears out the carpet we’re getting rid of and gets everything out of that part of the room (there isn’t much there, but it sure clutters up the rest of the basement). I get back to the house around 2 in the afternoon and we start putting down the flooring. Around 6 in the evening we realize we’re going to run out of Glue and call Dave for an emergency Home Depot run — he makes it to the house just as we use up the last of our supply, thus saving the day.
The linoleum is down — I don’t care for it, but it’s down. Putting it down really really sucked.
Monday, June 9th
We only got one gallon of the wall color paint (a decision I’m still sketchy on, but there you have it), so we paint the 1/3rd of the basement that we’re currently working on, though we’ll obviously have to do the whole thing when it’s said and done.
Somewhere in this day, I decide that I’d rather throw myself on the pile of wood that comprises our ‘custom’ bookshelf and set the whole mess aflame rather than reassemble the monster. We (read: I) settle on another solution.
Tuesday, June 10th
I go to Home Depot, buy two more gallons of the wall paint, a gallon of the ‘accent’ color, and 1&3/8th” crown molding, then go to WalMart and pick up three white 6’x2.5x1’ deep bookshelves.
Go home, assemble all three. Shove them against the wall, Affix them to wall studs and each other, shimming the bases as I do to get everything nice and level. Then, take the crown molding and nail that to the front of the bookshelves along the edges where they meet and along the top, creating the illusion that this is all one big bookshelf by coving up all the bits where they meet. Leave the bookshelves white, except for painting the front edges of each shelf and the crown molding itself the same (accent) color. It looks good. I like it.
Wednesday, June 11th
Find out about a carpet place near us that has all its area rugs on sale for 60% off. Stare a rugs a REALLY long time, but don’t buy any of them.
Get tack-strips to fasten the edge of the carpet down where it borders this new area and go home. These strips are metal and must be fastened to the floor with concrete nails. Long story short, this basically takes up all our time that evening, but it looks decent when we finish.
Thursday, June 12th
Jackie finds a blue area rug at Home Depot for ninety bucks. It’ll do. We clean the place up and make it habitable for people who aren’t us.
Friday, June 13th
People come over. A few unhelpful comments regarding ‘things that could have been done instead of linoleum’ see the light of day, but generally the change is received well — it may be the only thing that goes right the whole evening. C’est la vie.
Saturday, June 14th
Jackie and I picked up six pieces of furniture for 150 bucks. Nearly break our arms patting ourselves and each other on the back. People come over again, but this is a much less time-intensive affair for me, so I keep myself awake between conversations by painting the Other End of the basement (around the game table). No one passes out from paint fumes, so I call it a success.
Sunday, June 15th
Paint the main section of the room, the back hallway that leads to Justin’s room and the guest bath, and the gods-bedamned stairwell. Justin does a pretty good job painting all the ‘panels’ in the various doors the same color as the wall. It looks nice.
Hang out at the Consortium for awhile, then put all the furniture back when we get home.
Monday, June 16th
Some of the door panels need touch ups, as does the ‘back hall’. The stairwell does as well, but we returned the roller-brush-extender thing, so that will wait.
Other than that, the only thing remaining is painting the coffee and end tables that we got for the new room and picking up the last two bookshelves we need for the other end of the wall.
Big picture
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that, now that the linoleum is down, the parquet flooring that we REALLY wanted could go down — the problem is that it can’t be on basement cement (moisture or temp fluctuation or something), but it COULD be on a ‘floating’ mat — we could drop down some of the lino-roughing solution and glue the parquet to that stuff and shouldn’t have any problems (aside from the obvious “You’re off your nut for going through all that again.” problem).
We’ll see.
