Basement Part 1 - An introduction

Oh, the basement. Not our first project, but one of our more recent ones (so easier to find chronological photos!). Peruse, if you dare, the chilling photos of when we first laid eyes on the half-finished lower level of our new home:

 I like to refer to that fake grey/blue wood grain on the walls as "70s Murder Vibes." Aside from some brave and loving friends who kindly filled this room for a Halloween party, we avoided it most of the time.

So, obviously this room needed a face-lift and we tackled it (and continue to tackle it) quite gradually. It has been low on our priority list for the last year since it is an easily avoidable room. People don't need to walk through it (unless they're doing our laundry).

We decided on the following basement projects in the following order:

1. Remove nasty old black baseboard trim and carpet remnants
2. Remove old rusty carpet staples and nails from the stairs
3. Paint walls with white primer
4. Install new baseboards and trim
5. Remove old paint from masonry wall
6. Paint masonry wall with Drylock
7. Install Flooring
8. Paint walls their final color
9. Redo stairs
10. Replace door and windows

Here is our work-in progress after we had removed baseboards and painted the walls with primer:

We bought baseboards and trim from Home Depot. We don't own a miter saw (yet) so instead of cutting the corners with perfect angles to fit, we attempted this method with our jigsaw which worked alright (also, I love this YouTube channel). 

We bought a brad nailer from Home Depot to install the baseboard and trim (Bobby did most of the cutting and installing in this project cuz he's great like that). Ryobi has served us well so far, and it's nice having all the same chargers for all the same batteries so I think we're sticking with it!

Again, we had a ton of paint from a Freecycle pick-up, so we employed the help of some friends and covered the walls with two coats of white to hide the 70s Murder Vibes as best as possible.

Check out Part 2 for our favorite (NOT) part of this project, removing old paint from masonry walls!