The Basement

There have been a few posts where I mention that we are working on finishing our basement. We've lived in our house for about seven years now and what we had upstairs was enough. We never had the funds to work on our basement so it slowly became our storage unit. It was packed full of things that took months and many DI and garbage trips to clean out.
We refinanced our house back in May where we were able to get a lower interest payment and lower our monthly house payment while taking out a little money so we could finish our basement. Ideally, we would have loved to pay someone to do it, but we didn't have that much money. Also, I had a certain kidney stone that took a large portion of our extra money away.
Marty knows a lot of things and he's good at just about anything he tries, but he had no idea what he was doing in our basement. He's learning so much!! He just asked people, researched some things and figured most of it out. We did hire a few things out. Our friend and neighbor helped with some of the venting because we weren't sure how to do that. Turns out, it's very simple!
Here he is framing the first room in our basement, the storage room. We started this room in July 2009.
Then he moved to a bedroom.
My dad is also an incredibly knowledgeable man and he's been a great help. He's our personal electrician and taught Marty everything he knows about electrical. Marty now knows what he is doing and even did some of it by himself. My dad's a basic needs kind of guy so he did have to give Marty a hard time about all the "fancy" lights he wanted. He still helped us though. :) Thanks Dad!
Here's our other helper. I'm not sure what Brooklyn is even wearing, but it was hilarious! She's great at helping vacuum up the dust, priming, or just someone to talk to.
Then Scout camp's and Leadership training happened and all of Marty's vacation days disappeared. Then he started working on our basement at night (from about 9 pm to midnight) most of the time. See what I mean about hard worker? I pretty much shut down about 9 pm from any manual labor and Marty goes strong. This is the insulation in the storage room. This was completed in December 2009.
Here's our "toy room" or small bedroom. He's hard to get a good picture of it. Then we hired our neighbors to do the sheet rock and mud/tape. They gave us the lowest bid and it was nice that they were right next door. They came in and out of our window. It was weird, but nice to not have all the mess dragged all over our house. Yes, we could have done this ourselves and saved money, but at this point we were buying time. If Marty was doing all of this by himself for a few hours at a time, we probably would still be in the first room.
So the neighbors finished up three rooms (storage room and the two bedrooms) and then we moved the rest of our "junk" from one part of our basement to the other part and started over again with the framing. We were up priming and completely finishing our storage room until 2 am most of the nights around Christmas so we could keep up with our neighbors deadlines.
Marty's dad came down (I can't believe we didn't get a picture). He was a great helper and helped Marty frame the biggest room in our basement in one afternoon.
We had a 90 degree angled stairway entrance to the basement. It was impossible to bring anything large into the basement without going through the window. We decided to make the opening bigger so there is no longer a door anymore. Here is Marty cutting out our wall.
All done! Then the neighbors came in and went to work. They got it all done in a week (with a about 5 days of waiting). See why we paid them?!?
Entrance to the stairs.
Family room.
Hallway
Laundry area.
Bathroom.
Bedroom (the bigger of the two).

Marty and my dad put doors in yesterday. I thought doors would be simple, but it turns out they weren't. It was a huge ordeal. They are now in though, minus one door that we had to special order.
So this is where we are right now. We still have lots of work to do, but we're well on our way. Too bad our money is just about gone (if it weren't for that kidney stone). I'm not sure how we are going to afford carpet or couches, but I guess we'll figure that out later. Maybe tax refund?