Completed Fireplace Surround

The fireplace surround is finished and installed.  What do you think?

Rebuilding the Stairs

We bought our house new and the stairs the builder hand built were treacherous.  They were difficult enough for adults and I was sure one of the kids was going to get hurt on them.  There were a series of 10 stairs plus two different landings.  The treads were made from 2×6’s that warped badly, leaving a very uneven rise.  The platforms were built incorrectly, so the rise on them differed greatly from the rest of the stairs.  To boot, you had to reach out over the second step to flip on the lights.

My first plan was to rip them out and have a local stair building company install a pre-built stair case.  The estimate was about $800, so I decided to do some research.

First, I looked up a number of articles on how to build stairs.  I found an article on ThisOldHouse.com that detailed the calculations on how to determine the right rise and run for the stairs.  I did the calculations and measured the existing stringers.  The top stringers were cut correctly, but the warped treads made them very uneven.  The platforms were definitely built incorrectly.  UPDATE:  The article doesn’t appear on ThisOldHouse.com any longer, but I found one here: http://www.bobvila.com/HowTo_Library/Stairbuilding_Basics-Stairs-A1981.html.

I ripped the bottom two platforms out and cut stringers to even out the rise.  I installed them and a stair skirt (fyi, don’t do an internet search on stair skirt without safe search enabled).  I cut risers from 1x pine and bought pine treads for about $10 each.

I was about to prime the whole thing when my wife came home from visiting a model home where she had seen a stained stair tread with a painted riser.  I was very skeptical that the pine treads would look nice stained, but I think it came out well.  The stain here matches the cabinets and is the same stain I used on the bead board under the bar.

I also moved the hand rail to the other side of the stairs.  You can’t see it here, but I added a switch at the top of the stairs to the left of the door so you could turn on the light before entering the stairwell.

I’ve got a lot of hours into this stairwell.  The rebuild was time consuming.   The finish on the stairs was involved and there was a lot of electrical work involved (adding a four way switch, adding a second light, adding three LED lights along the stairwell. In addition, our paint scheme is three colors, which was a lot of work in this tight space.

Refinished Basement Stairs

Landing at bottom of basement stairs

WooHoo! Carpet is in!

New carpet in the recreation area

The carpet went in yesterday.  It looks and feels great! And the basement is very usable now.    In other news, the first batch of the home theater equipment arrived.  Lots of unpacking, manuals to read, and installing.  Should be exciting.

Arrival of the home theater equipment

New carpet in the media room

Projects for This Weekend

Carpet is getting installed on Monday so there are a few things that I need to get done this weekend.  Here’s what the media room and the recreation room look like now:

Media room before carpet install and equipment install

Fireplace Before Carpet

I’m planning built-in cabinets and bookshelves to flank the fireplace.  Saturday will largely be occupied by my daughter’s last day of soccer for the Fall season, so there isn’t much time to build, finish, and install the four base cabinets.

So my plan is to just build a level base to install the cabinets on.  That way the carpet installers can finish the job on Monday and I can come back to the cabinets as time allows.

You’ll notice that the paint around the fireplace surround has an outline of a mantle that I’ve yet to build.  My wife found a mission style mantle in “This Old House” magazine that we really liked.  I transferred the design to the wall to make sure the proportions looked right.  I’ll commit the measurements to paper and paint around the tile so it looks more finished.

If that all goes smoothly, I’ll prime and paint the doors I built to hide the breaker boxes and snake of cables that I’ve yet to connect.

We’ll see how I make out after the weekend.  Wish me luck.

Doors over Sub-Panels

View behind the doors

The Kitchen and Bar

Here’s a look across the bar into the kitchen.

Kitchen and Bar

Our design evolved for this space as we went.  We wanted a bar and sink.  And a refrigerator.  The sink placement was fixed because of the placement of our plumbing.  We decided on a full kitchen when we decided to add natural gas for the furnace and it wasn’t any more expensive to add another gas drop for a stove.

The bar and kitchen counters are topped with granite. The cabinets are from Wellbourn and feature a mocha stain.   Both the granite and the cabinets were professionally installed. Everything else is my work.

The bar is in a walk way through the kitchen, so it is important for the bar stools to slide under the bar.   My wife found these and the brackets for the bar top in a local decorator store.  We installed and stained the brackets and the bead board to match the cabinets.

Behind the bar is a single bowl stainless steel sink with a garbage disposal.  To the right of the sink is a dishwasher.  The faucet is from Kohler.

All the appliances are going to be black to match the granite.  We’re going to get stainless appliances for our main kitchen and move the black appliances we currently have down stairs.

The floor is a 20″ by 20″ porcelain tile that I installed.  They are heavy, especially after installing 450 square feet.

Lots of lighting in here.  There are recessed lights as well as under cabinet lighting.  We’ve wired for pendants over the bar, but haven’t selected them yet.  There are also switched outlets above the cabinets for rope lighting.

Home Theater Equipment is on the Way!

The media room in the new basement is the one feature that everyone is most excited about.  This weekend we went out and tried out theater seating.  After shopping at a few stores and reclining in a lot of chairs, we picked four chairs in a straight formation from Berkline.

We opted for a higher end chair that doesn’t have any power.  It is really comfortable and looks and feels well built.  Plus I wasn’t that excited about running four power cords across the floor as the seats are not adjacent to the wall.

Equipment selection has been stressing me out for a while.  When we were roughing in the room we had a sales guy from one of the local home theater stores come out and give us some advice and a quote.   Nice equipment, but it was a little pricey for my budget, almost $12000.  Since it included about $1200 in labor I decided to tackle it myself.

So, with budget in mind, here’s the equipment selection:

Basement Reno is Nearly Done

The long running renovation of our basement is nearly done.  We have been working on this project for over a year and passed all our final inspections on Nov. 6, 2008.  I did most of the work myself and my wife and I served as general contractor for the few projects we sub contracted out.

Carpet comes next week and it should really look finished!  Meanwhile, we are now shopping for all the fun stuff.

I learned a lot of new things on this project.  Overall I’ve found that with time and patience and lots of research you can figure out how to do just about anything.  However, finding decent information is sometimes tough.  So I figured I’d capture some of this information for all the DIY’ers out there that might be looking for some resources while finishing their basement.  As I move forward, I’ll add some pictures to illustrate the progress.