There's no place like home

If you're reading this, you probably already know that we have done a LOT of work on our house. From painting and recarpeting to replacing all of the windows and the basement ceiling, it's been a work of love. Grant spent an entire summer fixing the sprinkler system. I've spent countless hours decorating and organizing.

Despite all that we accomplished when we first bought the house two and a half years ago, there was always one giant project looming over us: the basement! The layout was messed up and there were a million things we could have done to more effectively use the space. A couple of months ago, we decided to just start working on it. Enough planning, dreaming, thinking...we were ready to put the rubber to the road. So, one quiet Friday evening when we didn't want to spend money on a date night, we decided to stay in and kick down some walls. And let me tell you, it was fun!!

Since then, we have patched over a useless second door into the "bedroom" (there's no fire escape so it's not technically a bedroom), created a door to access our previously walled in heater (that happens to be 26 years old), created another door that added space to our storage room, did a bunch of electrical work, and other stuff I'm forgetting. All I can remember is that I very strongly dislike mudding and sanding. Ugh!

All of the boring stuff aside, here are some pictures of our work:

BEFORE

A look down the hallway into our basement. Notice the unused space at the end of the hallway. We tore down the wall on the left from the end of the hallway up to the closest door.

AFTER

Same hallway. Notice that we used the space at the end of hallway to create a larger storage room. The light in the ceiling that you see in the other picture is now inside the storage room.

BEFORE

The two doors you see lead into the same room. What a stroke of genius!

AFTER

There is now only ONE door leading into the "bedroom." This gives you another perspective on how we've shortened the hallway and added space to the storage room.

And the door on the left used to be part of the wall. Our good and faithful heater is behind it.

We've done some other work, too. We changed out almost all of the door hardware upstairs to brushed silver. Much nicer than the retro gold we had, not to mention the fact that we had about five different styles of door knobs. And the guest bathroom door didn't lock. No big deal. We got a steal of a deal on a china hutch, which freed up a TON of space in the kitchen. We also rearranged our office, including a much needed desk for Grant off of Craigslist. We love good deals.

Enough for tonight. I'm still recuperating from the crazy Purdue/KU game. If you didn't watch it, well, you missed a good one. Unless, of course, you loathe KU, in which I apologize for your poor choice of team support. (I'm a bit sarcastic, by the way.)

New Zealand is coming up quickly and we are excited! I will tell the story about how we are even going in my next post.

Love, the George family