The Next Basement Room

We've been finishing our basement for almost 2 years now. Two years ago in March, I started work on the first room. We really needed another bedroom. Lincoln was gone for a few days for work, so I enlisted the help of my cousin and her handy husband and we began construction. In anticipation of the start of the project, I had been saving some cash to put toward materials. I had something like $200 or $300. Not a lot of money, but when you do the work yourself (or have your handy cousin-in-law do it), it's just the cost of materials. I was able to get the 2x4s for framing the walls, electrical supplies, drywall, nails for the nail gun (which I think was my greatest cost!), screws for the drywall, and a building permit. It's been two years, there may have been more. So about a year later, we had the first room complete. (Actually, we still don't have closet doors in, the outlet spacers in, and a couple pieces of trim up.)

Next we focused on closing off the hallway, so the girls wouldn't feel like they were sleeping out in the unfinished basement. We've been plugging away at that, very slowly.




Along the way, we also began some work on the next bedroom. We had my cousin-in-law come over and frame up a closet for us.


A few months later, Lincoln put a heat run in.


When my parents came to visit over the summer, we hung the drywall ceiling. This got us excited and motivated. We thought.

Work halted for a while, and then this past fall we hired a friend to come put in another window in the room. One of the concerns about this room was that there was not enough square inches of window compared to square footage of the room for it to pass code as a bedroom. We really wanted to be able to sell this home as a 5 bedroom someday and we had a new construction window sitting in our basement, (apparently left over from construction of the home- it's been here since we bought the house), so we decided to install it. Installing a window was a bit intimidating for us. It's not hard, but it is precise.


The window looks out on our garden. Our garden that is a frozen tundra currently.


This winter we began work on drywalling the walls. We switched our focus to the hallway again, hoping to close off the unheated part of the basement with winter upon us.


We have insulated the wall in the unheated portion of the basement and our door we ordered is in and just waiting for us to pick it up and install it. Once that is in, we will return to this room. I am SO excited to get this done!