I forgot to take a before photo, but my husband, a friend and I demolished a wall and took apart a “bar” alcove today…
We will be building a bedroom down here, and doing a few other things.
We’ll be hiring a handyman for the building portion, but figured we’d save ourselves a bit of cash and do the demolition ourselves.
Where the floor is missing, there used to be a wall. It’s always bothered me that we had this gigantic laundry room and a tiny “living space” down here.
There are some complications with building a bedroom here, such as where to put a window, because the window you see in the picture has the deck squarely in front of it. The bedroom window will likely go somewhere around where the treadmill is in this picture, but we’ll do some consultation with a window person (and they’ll install the window too, of course).
This used to be the kids’ play area, but as they’re getting older they have been playing in their rooms more. Also, once we build a bedroom down here, they’ll have more space in their own rooms to have their toys there (currently the younger 2 share a room).
This is what the part between the floored area and concrete floor looked like before, minus the little “stage,” as that came out when we redid the flooring.
Continuation of the wall that we took down today.
These photos are quite old; the basement had already changed quite a bit since we had created this little playroom. We had changed the flooring and added shelving for the toys, and my husband had built a set of monkey bars for the kids to play in the winter. That came down a few months back as the kids are all too tall for them now. So the basement is in its 3rd or 4th iteration at this point, lol
Here’s a photo of when we first added the flooring and built some shelves for toy storage
The plan is to finish insulating the walls, because that was never done properly (as you can see in the first picture at the back.
Then the goal is to build a bedroom, a small office for my husband, create a small space for the cat’s stuff, organize a laundry room that makes sense (I really, really don’t like our laundry room), and if we can salvage a tiny bit more space, a small exercise area.
For now we’re eating one slice at a time and just demolishing. Next is talking to the handyman about the insulation. Construction will come after all that.