Basement Clean Up & Reversing the Laundry Room Door

Basement Guestroom


Zohra's visit for 2 weeks on the 30th has prompted a massive clean up of the basement. She's coming for a job and we are actually charging her money so I feel like we have to 'do it up' nicer. It is a testament to the amount of stuff we have that we can furnish another little studio downstairs. It's bare but the essentials are there.

The layout is nicer in the sense that the kitchen and bathroom are consolidated in the front area making it a cosier (aka small) studio apartment. The bedroom in the back we have converted into a tool room/storage and the even smaller room way in the back where the furnace is, we have made into a laundry room.

So we cleaned downstairs and put in the single air mattress and some cobbled together furniture and I think it looks all right!

This led us to another project we have been planning to do for a while - flipping the laundry room door so that it opens the other way. It used to irritate me that the door opened into the left wall and the light switch was on the other side. We have had difficulties actually, somehow the door isn't swinging right after we flipped it. A little research on the internet and we are heading back down there today to try and figure out what we did wrong. Our first DIY project and it seemed like it would be easy but apparently it isn't!

Mike and I have a week off before we go back to work so our plan is to do all the little projects we need to do - this includes fixing the pantry wall where the washer/dryer was. We went to Lowe's yesterday and bought some sheetrock and some tools (his dad gave us a $100 gift card from Lowe's) so I think we have everything we need. This door has hung us up a little (pun intended) but hopefully we will succeed.

Adjustments

Some things i have had to adjust to in the new place:-

Ants in the kitchen
Less natural lighting
Older more worn apartment
Terribly laid out bathroom
No Thai delivery place close by
No easy parking

Positives:-

It's quieter - not on the bus route
I have a yard
I also have half a basement
It's warm!

The old apartment was on the top floor and had 2 skylights. In the winter, I froze all the time. The landlord didn't seem to believe me (or rather, he was too cheap) and we would get bursts of heat at 6am and 6pm and 11pm. The rest of the time was a fight to retain the heat from those long awaited bursts.

The Grays have the top floor now and are basically the reason why we are so cosy. They insist our heating system is 'defective' but they're just not used to living in Brooklyn in a 100 year old house on the top floor. And they don't have blinds either which don't help. Every other day, they are in our apartment tweaking with the thermostat. I'm just waiting for the realisation to sink in that the heating system isn't broken, it just isn't efficient! To make it worse for them, they used to control their own heat in their tiny 500 sq ft apartment in Chinatown and now they have double that space and no control. Mike and I have some adjustments to make to our new place, but I would say that the Grays have a bigger adjustment to make since they made a huge leap in location and size of their new digs.

We put our taking down the wall off for a bit until my job is done and Mike is back from Atlanta. We did buy a nice Douglas Fir Christmas tree and it's nice in the new dining room. Makes me happy every time I see it. Tomorrow, I will wrap some presents that I got for Mike and it will look complete.

Zohra might come to stay with us for a bit in the basement. If she takes this NYC job she's been offered she will be with us for 2 months. It would be nice pocket money (oil bill was $900!) but better than that, Zohra would be here!

Phase 2

The re-arranging went well. We were done by 3 pm on Day 2. Enough time to relax and watch some football and clean up a little. My camera battery charger died so I can't really put up pics just yet. We pushed ourselves on Day 1 and ended up working till 1am but it was worth it the next day.

To create some privacy between the bedroom and the living room (soon to be the study) we put up a curtain and the only fabrics we had were random ones. Now the living room looks like a gypsy's den - very mysterious. Once we knock down the wall between the present study (soon to be living room) we will move switch the 2 rooms. Eventually, we will install sliding doors where the curtain is which should allow privacy if we use it as a guest room as well as allow light through. I wrestled with the idea that it's now a railroad 2 bedroom as opposed to the current layout which is a true 2 bedroom but I couldn't really deal with sleeping in the back room next to the kitchen. Besides, the way we have laid things out, when we sell in a few years, the new owner can always move back there. We haven't done anything that would make this set up permanent. Even taking down the wall from (old)bedroom /(new)dining room and (old)study/(new)living room is something they can easily put back. The seller told me she put up that wall after all.

Phase 2 this weekend is nothing to do with that, actually. We still have to patch the holes in the wall left behind from where the washer/dryer used to be. I want to re-purpose that as a pantry and we need to shelve it as well. It would have been a good time to do the basement too (where the contractor had re-routed into the new laundry room) but the Grays have visitors so we will have to wait a little. We want to get our feet wet anyway. Guys from work gave me some very useful tips and so it's a trip to Home Depot this weekend to get some sheetrock.

It's fun being a homeowner. Mike and I work really well as a team. I usually plan, he tweaks the plan and he runs point on the execution. There's no doubt he's better with his hands than me, but I'm a quick study so it all works out. I feel that Phase 1 really boosted our confidence in each other and in ourselves. Even though, in the big picture, it seems like we really didn't do very much, we had a tight deadline and quite a lot to do. And it was fun drinking some bourbon at the end of the day and congratulating our smug selves.