Oh my gosh, we are finally finished! :)

Ok so after two years, and a few soap operaish moments (ie Andrew trying to chop his arm off with the chop saw, instead of the piece of wood he was attempting to cut), our basement is finally finished! Unfortunately, I don't have any before pictures (bad me! I have an excuse. I didn't have a camera until July of this year!!!) So you'll just have to use your imagination as I describe how it USED to be.

When we moved in back in November of 2005, you would walk into the room and half of the room was just the cement wall and the other half was covered in the 70's most popular style of wood paneling! The stairs were completely closed in so you had about a doorway's amount of room to get into them and it was just one big huge dark, dirty room. The furnace and hot water heater were just sitting one side of the room, completely open.

So we decided to take the one big room and give us 4 smaller rooms. One room became a storage area. We moved the washer and dryer hook ups to a different corner and made the 2nd room a laundry room/utility area. The third room enclosed another small storage space while closing in the hot water heater and furnace. The largest room is now our third "living room." We already have a family room and formal living room upstairs. Our already large 1700 square foot house just became an even larger 2000 square foot house. Yikes. I don't know what to do with all the space! We already got lost in all the space we had before. We also knocked out half the wall along the stairway in order to make a nice bannister area.

Adding all of this space also allowed us to move the office from our third bedroom to the basement. So we now have two guest bedrooms! :) I am so thrilled. It looks wonderful. Andrew did the bulk of the work with help from my father, his father, our friends Mike, Paul and John, my mother and I. So... Here are some pics!