Basement Pictures - the Boys' Room

The Boys' Room

Even though the dimensions aren't the same, the boys' room is now where the toy room used to be.  I posted this diagram of the old and new layouts, so you might want to reference that again to get a good feel for the spaces I'm talking about.

Before, as the toy room:

Oh, oh!  You can see the ducky shower curtain in the second picture!  See?!  Isn't it great?!

Anyways, the toy room, as you can tell, was kind of a grab bag of stuff.  It worked well for our needs at the time and the kids loved playing down there.

During tear-down:

The basement had 2 pink poles (the previous owners loved pink) that were covered by really thick walls.  Apparently the previous owners also had a thing for do-it-yourself concrete walls that weren't properly secured to anything.  Those crew guys are tearing out the concrete wall in this picture.  Anyways, in the new plan, this pink pole went into the framing between the kids' rooms.

Also, in this picture, the back wood paneled wall is the wall between the toy room and Miciah's old room.

That same wall without the wood paneling, but with the wood framing.

During construction:

 The wood framing you see is the doorway to the boys' room.  The rest of the framing is that metal stuff.

This is the corner of their room and the outline of their closet.

The window in their room was cut from nothing.  Here it is, half cut out:

This is the picture I told you about where you can see the I-beams added to support our bowed wall.  They're the darker beams, not the metal framing for the walls.

 All the way cut out!

Window fully installed, with dry wall up.

This is the pile of dirt that was created from digging out the window well.

A side story:  This window caused us some grief.  When the basement was water-proofed, they didn't do the drainage on this side of the house because we told them that a window was going to be installed.  They said they'd come back after the window was done and finish the job.  No problem.  Or so we thought.  It turns out that they had to do a bunch of other work that they hadn't mentioned before, and blah blah blah.  They started doing some of the remaining work but didn't finish it.  In the meantime, it started raining.  A lot.  And the drainage wasn't fully connected all the way around the house.  This meant that nearly ALL of the water was draining into newly-dug window well outside Miciah's room.

Rob called them and they, of course, could do nothing for us.  SO many phone calls.  But we still had to fix the water issue.  All that new work, and we didn't want to have water rushing into our basement.  So Rob was out there, in the pouring rain, digging a trench from her window well out into the yard, just to give the water a lower spot to drain into.  Then we rallied one of our neighbors who said he had a pump.  Rob hooked up this pump to siphen off the water when it got too high and literally SHOOT it into the backyard.  One night it was driving rain all night and Rob had to go out there twice to make sure no water came into the house.

The whole thing was ridiculous and cost us (but mainly Rob) a lot of time and headache.  The plus side is that 1- they fixed it all up in the end and 2- they gave us our service contract for free indefinitely (a $75/year value).  We got gyped on that deal, for sure, but hey, our basement is now dry and we've nearly forgotten all about that horrendous rain storm where one or both of us were perpetually covered in mud.  Distant memory.

The closet getting dry walled.

Now:

Again, the closet doors had come off.  They're now back on - thanks, Rob!  The boys never keep the doors closed anyways.  They also never keep their closet organized.  This drives me batty, but it's not my room, so I don't care too much.  In fact, the level of dirty captured in these pictures is about average for them.

The space works great for a bunk bed.  When they're bigger, if they no longer want a bunk bed, we're going to have to figure something else out that's better.  ...  Or just make them keep their bunk beds until they move out at 18.  Hmm...

Their room has not been problem-solved yet, in terms of furniture and storage.  My guess is that we will do some of that this summer.