Progress to Date - Family Room

Summer, 1998

In case you haven't been checking up on our progress lately, don't worry - you haven't missed much. It's summer, and we have way too many outdoor activities to keep us busy. We'll probably do some more serious work on the basement in the late fall. If we do manage to do something significant before then, we'll let you know.

April 30, 1998

Well here we are four months later. We've almost finished double-coating the basement cinderblock walls with watersealant, and I got a little done today in the area under the front step that will be our cedar closet. We decided to use half-louvered bifold doors for the closet; we bought a set at Home Depot the other day. And I had forgotten how fast we go through Liquid Nails when putting up furring strips and foamboard.

December 30, 1997

We have ignition! Yes! The fireplace is finished! Well, as finished as it can get for now. Once the sheetrocking is done, we'll hire someone to install some brick-looking ceramic tile around the fireplace, but that'll be down the road. Now, we're debating the rest of the floorplan. We need to include some storage beyond the cedar closet we're planning to build under the front step, and we're trying to figure out exactly what we need and how best to fit it into the space. This could be an interesting discussion.

December 28, 1997

Time flies when you're having fun. The fireplace is *almost* done. We built a raised hearth out of treated lumber, positioned the fireplace, had the gas line run, built the frame and ran the electrical wiring. The only remaining work is installing the ignition and fan switches on the wall.

September 15, 1997

Looks like we're back at it. I'm almost done cementing closed the south window. I've left an opening where the fireplace vent will go. I was unable to remove the wood window frame, so I just cemented it in. We have to waterseal it next, then test the seal to make sure it holds. Since this area will be behind a wall, I want to make sure it doesn't leak.

Summer 1997

Ah, summer - the season of working outside. The basement has been pretty much neglected so we can take care of some outdoor projects. We've landscaped, replaced a fence destroyed by high winds, setup a 12-foot above ground pool for the kids (that was NOT fun), taken down several tree branches and performed other feats of wonder.

Julie and the kids managed to take down the sheetrock on the basement's load-bearing wall, and they also applied the waterseal to the south end of the basement. After some heavy rains, we still have a leak under the front steps to take care of. We hope to bring home a load of lumber before the end of July.

March 15, 1997

Over the past week, the rest of the ceiling has come down. I bought an industrial dust respirator from Sears for $35 and it works great. We now have several piles of debris to get rid of, and many nails to pull out of the joists. When that's all done, we'll move all the stuff still in the room over to the north wall and start framing where the fireplace will go.

March 5, 1997

Bagged the rest of the debris, while cleverly not wearing a breathing mask. *cough* *cough*. We now have enough ceiling removed that we can begin to frame the wall were the fireplace will go, though we must waterproof first.

I'll probably take down at least another ten feet of ceiling before we do any framing, but Julie wants to get the damn fireplace in forthwith. Doing that would also remove the largest single box from the basement, giving us one less thing to work around.

March 3, 1997

Finally, after a long pause while we dealt with other things, we got some work done downstairs. Julie and Dan cleared out a lot of junk, and moved everything else to the north end. After dinner, I ripped down about ten feet of drywall off the ceiling. Eventually, we'll have a suspended grid ceiling like in the office. I got about 20% of the mess bagged before the dust got to me. Even with a dust mask and safety glasses, it was no fun.

October 29, 1996

We got the permits for the main room today. Oh, joy. For the past few weeks, we've been working bit-by-bit at moving our stuff out of the area. We've moved about half of it so far.

Chaos Central | Eric's Page | The Construction Zone | The Boat | Hotlist | People | SysAdmin Page