Inside Our Home: The Basement

When we bought our home, the basement could only be accessed from the outside.  You can see from the paint on the wall, at some point there must have been a staircase going up into the house.  Our basement "before" seemed really creepy, like one those places someone might kidnap and stash you in.  And these support columns were all over.  

Dad and Josh spent 2 months hand digging the basement floor, so we could have a full 7 foot ceiling height after the finished concrete.  

 We had a lot of help with the concrete.  My Dad and brothers Jeff and Josh came to help us.

The before and after photos are below:

 The basement is entirely the "boys space", they have their own small living room, a play room, a full bathroom and their bedrooms.

 The boys playroom.  

We set up the basement so that it could easily be converted into an apartment should the need arise for someone to come live with us.  The boys current playroom is all wired to have a kitchen added someday.  

 Future Basement Kitchen Plans

The boys bathroom: they have a separate toilet room and double sinks that make it great for sharing.

 This room is Kaden's.  He finally has his very own room.

The electrical room.  Josh did all the electrical work for our home.  He is so resourceful and talented!  And he saved us thousands of dollars by doing the work himself.

I did what I could to help him.  The electrical inspector wanted the ground wires (the copper wires) attached to their own ground panel.  Josh had to work and couldn't get away before the inspector was scheduled to come back, so I had to move all the ground wires myself. It wasn't pleasant, but I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.

The electical/utility room.  It is also wiring and plumbed for an additional washer and dryer should we ever buy one.

Inside Our Home: The West Entry

Our home originally had just one bathroom, located on the main floor...and it wasn't pretty.

The original bathroom: The shower looked like some kind of crazy space pod, the shape and position of the bathtub was odd and the colors...  At some point, a previous owner had put in a laundry room in above the shower and they had plumbed the washer water to drain directly into the shower below.  That's just one of the many crazy odd things we had to deal with from previous "do-it-yourselfers".

Here are the before and after photos of the bathroom transforming into our new 1/2 bath and west entry/mud room.
Above: we opened up the wall and added in the staircase to the basement.

Above: photos taken during our remodel.  The floor was rotten and needed to be replaced.

Our laundry is just to the side of the west entry, we closed in part of the original covered porch to allow for the extra space.

The 1/2 bath.  My mother-in-law made us the "Be Kind" hanging quote.  Thanks Jenn!

Inside Our Home: The Master Suite

The master suite is just off of the living room.

 The french doors open onto the covered porch.

Through the door on the left of the photo is the master bath.  The space where the master bath is now was originally a bedroom.

I must admit, the master bath is my favorite room in the house.  The vanity is a vintage piece we picked up at an antique store in Portland.  We had Dad convert the drawers to fit the sink plumbing so they could still be usable.  The vanity and the caprese light I bought from West Elm, might be my favorite elements in our bathroom.  I did most of the tile work around the bathtub myself and Josh did the tile work in the shower.  I still need to grout the tile around the tub.  But I love how everything turned out.

We closed off another portion of the covered back porch to create a spacious walk-in closet.  I love having so much space.  Sadly, I only left one third of the closet to Josh, but I don't think he minds too much.  We would like to build more shelving in the future, but for now it can wait.

Inside Our Home: Kitchen + Dining

Moving from the living room to the dining room:

From the photos below, you will see that swapped the kitchen/dining room locations.  Our new kitchen is now where the dining room used to be and our dining room is where the kitchen had been.

What we did in the kitchen:

-Completely tore out the original cabinets and flooring.

-Moved the arched opening to the other side of the room.

-New tile flooring the dining room.

-Added all new cabinets (which we assembled ourselves)

-Added solid walnut counter tops and painstakingly applied coats of epoxy and polyurethane to the surface.  

-Refinished the original hardwood floors.

-Tiled and grouted the backsplash with penny tiles.

-Added a pantry.

-And, let not forget to mention that Josh made a special trip to Seattle to get me the apron front sink from IKEA.

I love that sink and IKEA Portland no longer had it in stock as they were discontinuing the current version.

During the remodel.

Here's a cute video of Paxton showing you "How to" remove wall tile.  

Again, we used the old wood from the living room wall to build the open shelving in the kitchen and in my pantry.

I love my open shelves and the penny round tiles. Although, the tiles are a little tricky to hang.  I did most of the tiling and grout in the kitchen myself.

 The original cabinets were in really bad shape.

We pushed the dining room area out and closed-in part of the original covered porch.

Inside Our Home: Main Entry + Living Room

As you will see, we made a lot of changes inside.  We took everything down to the studs and sub-flooring, as well as moved and/or added doors, windows and walls.

Here is our main entry and living room:

Here's what we did in the living room:
-Shifted the front door location and replaced the door.
-Moved and replaced the main window.
-Stripped and refinished the original hardwood floors.
-Added new hardwood flooring in the entry to match.
-Removed the wall in between the original front door and the upper staircase
-New Sheetrock, paint, trim and lighting.

Below is a video clip of Josh demolishing the wall.

Removing the old flooring from the entry was a lot of work, as there were 5 different layers of flooring.  And the wall Josh took down was almost entirely made of wood.  We believe the wood wall was original to the home built in 1910.  It provided us with several long 1" think beautiful old boards.

With the old wood, we decided to build a bookcase for this wall.  Our inspiration was a bookcase we had seen at Crate & Barrel (pictured below), their cost: $1499.00  

Our bookcase: $300.00 for pipes and fittings.  

I love having such a handy husband who can build things for me and I love how it turned out!  ...Now I want to use some of the old ship-lap wood to build some storage crates for the bottom shelves.  

The Crate & Barrel bookcase and close-ups of our shelves.