Basement Closet Finished

Except for the door, the closet is finished!

I had hoped to stain this closet like we stained the others (with the support boards stained and the shelf boards not), but masking was taking way too long and I would have had to go buy more masking tape so I gave up the effort. I was beyond ready to be done with this project so I bailed on that plan and just stained it all the same color.

It's time to start packing up the dressers to prepare for the movers on Wednesday. And, I think I can finally schedule delivery of my long arm. I'm excited about all the quilting fun I get to have this summer.

Dungeon No More!

I still need to finish staining the doors and baseboard in the rest of the basement, but the family room/office is done!! I dug through my old photos because I thought it would be fun to compare how it looked when we bought the house. 

(Unfortunately, most of the built-ins that were in place when we bought the house had to be removed before we moved in for the basement repair; the foundation had some large cracks in it at the time and we had them repaired immediately.)

I'm pretty excited about how this turned out. Tim Austin did a wonderful job. It's actually nicer than I originally anticipated. I had not expected to have wainscoting in there, but I didn't want drywall all the way down to the floor and plywood worked out better with Tim's plan.

Almost Finished

I've finished varnishing the woodwork in the family room!

I was pretty excited about being finished and then I started taking off the masking tape. The delay in removing it was not kind as there are a number of spots where it peeled off the paint. Sigh. This is by far the worst spot that needs to be touched up.

Tim left me with a very heavy 5-gallon can of leftover paint so I am going to take it into Sherwin Williams tomorrow to get some help with mixing and pouring into smaller cans. 

Ready for Varnish!

I'm so happy we reached the point where I can finally start varnishing! Yay!

Obviously, it would have been nice if I hadn't messed it up and added two weeks of sanding to the process, but I'm happy I finally got there in the end. Let this serve as a cautionary tale for anyone else who decides to follow in our footsteps. Be sure to test your stain on scraps. And thoroughly mix the stain beforehand.

I'm hoping to start varnishing tomorrow.

Reinstalling Boards

I was gone for several days this past week, but I have returned and am getting back to work. Today we started reinstalling the boards. We decided to move some of them around because they had visible knots and we replaced a couple of them. 

Tomorrow we should be able to reinstall the last of the boards and the wainscot staining will finally be finished. It's been an unnecessarily long process, but I'm looking forward to finally reaching the next step.

More Staining

Got the first coat done; round 2 starts tomorrow.

I'm hoping to finish all the staining in the family room this weekend. I'll still have the baseboards on the other side of the basement, but this hard part is nearly finished.

Update on Saturday: Second coat finished. They look darker in person than they do in the photos. I'll let them dry until tomorrow then I'll finish the 2nd coat on the walls.

Update on Sunday: All finished. 

Next, we'll reinstall the boards on the seams, touch up any spots that need it, then I'll varnish everything.

Staining Again

I finally coaxed myself to start staining again. 

It's better this time. I'm glad I took the time to sand it; I will like this much better, even the areas with the dark undertone from the disastrous dark red mahogany stain. 

On the bright side, once this basement wood is finished, I never have to use this awful stain again.

The next coat is a gel stain so it is much easier to apply.

The light marks will be covered by boards, once they are reinstalled.

Basement Sanded

I guess it's been more than a week since I last posted. I sanded the plywood down in the basement. It took me several days. I obviously couldn't get the darkest areas as light as I would have liked.

I went and bought the new red mahogany stain and tested it with pre-stain wood conditioner on scrap plywood. This is what the color was supposed to look like.

I'm actually ready to start staining again, but I can't because it will take too many days to finish and we're going to have a friend stay with us next weekend and we can't have the house stinking like stain and varnish. It's pretty horrible for several days.

So, instead, I'm planning to focus on cleaning up and prepping to start right after the visit.

I F***ed Up

I messed up the basement staining project. Obviously. I know I could just paint the plywood and I probably should, but I can't without at least trying to fix my mess. Anyone who has followed the blog for a while will know that I'm not good at settling. 

I stained the first part on Sunday and it was darker than I wanted, but it was tolerable

but as I worked my way around the room, it kept getting darker and darker. I obviously had a mixing issue. By the afternoon, it was so dark, it was really unacceptable so I stopped.

I'm frustrated with myself because I knew better. I don't know why I didn't get samples of the plywood and practice; I always have before. I guess I was just impatient to get this project done. (I want my long arm machine!)

I spent Monday trying to figure out what to do next. I really don't like painting wood, even plywood. I tried sanding down one of the sections of plywood and the stain came off fairly well, so I decided to give it a shot. I started out by stripping the boards. I tried to sand them in place, but it really wasn't going to work because I couldn't get to the edges, so Jeff uninstalled them for me.

About two-thirds of the boards I could just flip over and go with the unstained backsides, the others I had to sand down through the stain.

Today, finally, I turned my attention to sanding the plywood. This is what I could get done in about four hours. I'm hoping as the stain gets lighter, the panels will sand faster and maybe I'll get this done by the end of the weekend. Unfortunately, I'm not super motivated to work for long hours on this project.

This was after one pass with 80 grit sandpaper. I can't sand the plywood clean because I'm worried I'll sand through the douglas fir ply. This should be good enough to apply a lighter color. I will be going over this area again with finer grit sandpaper after I finish the first pass.

I already bought the proper stain and I took it to Sherwin Williams and had it shaken. I will not be making this mistake again. Ever!

Now that all the boards are removed, I am going to go ahead and stain them loose like I usually do. It should also make it easier to stain the wainscoting. Once everything is stained I'll reinstall the boards and then apply the varnish finish coat. 

Basement Staining Day 1

Upstairs, our wood was all stained with a combo of two different stains. The first coat was Mohawk Wiping Wood Stain in Red Mahogany. The second coat was Wood Kote Jel'd Stain in Cherry color.

I tried to finish the wood in the basement with the same, but when I went and bought the stain, I accidentally grabbed the Dark Red Mahogany stain and didn't realize it until after I'd used half the can. To be honest, if I'd realized Light Red Mahogany was an alternative, I would have gotten that instead. A lighter stain would have been preferred for the basement.

It is what it is; I'm already halfway finished with the basement family room. The Dark Mahogany is dark. When I started this morning, I panicked a little about how dark it was but then I reminded myself that once it dries, it does lighten up. And once I add the Jel'd Cherry, the color will shift and be closer to the upstairs.

This plywood is sort of horrible to stain. It immediately absorbs the stain and is nearly impossible to spread it out and get it even. But the plywood was a reasonable compromise to save money on this job. If it turns out really horrible, I will simply paint the interior of the panels, like this.

It took me about 6 hours to stain half the family room today and so I decided to spread the task over a couple of days. That means that it's going to be at least 4 days of staining in just the family room side of the basement. Then I'll have to repeat the process for the rest of basement, so it looks like I'll be at this for about a week.

Time for Staining!

I am so excited! Tim is finished with the basement! Now it is my turn; I need to spend the next week or so staining and finishing the wood. It's vaguely tempting to just varnish the wood so it would be lighter, but then it wouldn't blend with the rest of the house as well. And I definitely like to have everything be matchy matchy.

I'm really looking forward to being able to move into the space, it's actually nicer than I was originally anticipating. Our goal was for the space to be comfortable and have good light. We definitely have achieved that. 

I hope I can do a decent job on the staining. I want to get started this weekend but I need to take a look around first and see how much sanding I'll need to do first. I hope not too much.

Basement Wainscoting

Tim and Tony have made a lot of progress on the basement this week. I didn't get down for the painting photos because everything was masked up and I was trying to stay out of the way. But the plastic is down and the wood molding has started going up.

This is the closet door. Tragically, they had to cut about a foot off the bottom to get it to fit in the space.

They'll probably spend another week or so finishing everything, then I can get in there and stain.

Our rugs have all arrived. I opened one of the small ones and to be honest, they've exceeded my expectations. I was expecting a bit of a plastic feel, but they're soft and look pretty good. Even the back is nice, it looks much like a hand-woven rug. I guess we'll see how well they wear. For the cost, I don't have high expectations.

Basement Furnishings

I spent the day shopping for basement furnishings. We'd been planning to replace the old rugs and buy a sofa with a drop-down table for movie time. But now that Jeff has started working again, he needs a quiet place to work so we changed the plan to include a workstation in the theater side of the room.

With the desk added, though, we don't have room for a sofa. I spent a couple hours shopping around online and found a few options until I finally decided it would make the most sense to just relocate our Stressless chairs downstairs from the main floor. It's not like I'll spend much time sitting around once I get my long arm machine next month.

That still left floor coverings. I gave away the old rugs, so we do actually need new rugs. I spent several days agonizing over some hand-knotted rugs that are on sale, but they're still pretty expensive. I'm not sure I can justify more than $3K for the basement family room. 

So I was astonished today when I found some polypropylene rugs that I really liked. I don't normally go for plastic rugs, but the pattern seems period and they're super cheap. And if the basement leaks water again they should survive. Despite my reservations, I ordered a set of the Unique Loom Carnation Edinburgh Geometric Area Rugs from Overstock.com while they're on sale for President's Day. At Jeff's request, I ordered the black ones.

And because I clearly spend too much time in Electric Quilt, I thought it would be fun to try and design a quilt that coordinates with them. This is my first attempt. I will no doubt try a couple more versions before I actually settle on one.

Magnolia Dreams Quilt

Basement Drywalled

They finished on Friday. The end of this project is in sight.

Basement Progress

There's been quite a bit of progress on the basement project since the last time I posted. Everything is framed up and the flooring has been installed, but it is currently covered up to protect it for the drywall install. Here is how it looked last week before they covered it up. We ended up choosing Lifeproof Rigid Core Luxury Vinyl Flooring in the Georgia Clay color; it is basically a waterproof plastic flooring that looks like wood and it should be able to survive if we have some water infiltration again.

Tim and Tony took off last Friday while they waited for the electricians then they all returned to the job on Monday morning. The electricians have been here all week and I think they're nearly finished. We decided to get a new electrical panel installed because our older panels are really quite full. It was installed in our front storage area and will provide service for all the new electrical in the basement. They also put in a new charging unit for Jeff's plug-in hybrid vehicle.

This week, Tim installed the family room wainscoting so it would be easier to locate the power boxes in the middle of the panels. We're just using douglas fir plywood for wainscoting because it was relatively affordable (compared to lumber). This is the only room that will have wainscoting; the rest of the basement will be finished with drywall.

It's exciting, this room is going to be so nice.