The Basement: Week 1- Home Theater to Sandbox

Once upon a time, these two crazy kids fell in love and got married.

Remember that?  It was fantastic.

While we were in Michigan celebrating with them, a funny thing happened.  Back home, we got 13 inches of rain in 24 hours.  This conveniently happened after Jynx had (once again) decided to remove the downspout extentions from the house.  The result:

Not fantastic.

Major water in the basement.  Mass chaos and pandemonium.

We had been wanting to finish/remodel the basement for some time anyway, but didn't want to put in all that work to have it flood again.  Sure, 13 inches in 24 hours is probably an anomaly (although it's not as rare as you might think in our neck of the woods) and maybe if we just re-worked the downspout extensions and buried them underground so a certain cocker spaniel would keep her grubby face off of them, we might never have this issue again. 

But we also knew that the concrete slab in our basement was only an inch thick in places, when it needed to be 4 inches.  Indubitably, it needed to be replaced.

So, we called The People That You Call When You Have A Water Problem In Your Basement: Midwest Basement Systems.  When they waterproof your basement, it is guaranteed for the life of the home. 

The estimate they gave us was costly, but not surprising.  We could save money if we ripped out the slab ourselves, and it we paid in full the day they were finished.  Since Tim has a Sunday School class full of high-school guys who are capable and very willing to help with the slab (it means a better home theater room for their x-box parties), we decided to opt for those savings.  We just had to wait until we saved up the cash for the project.

This summer, we had the money in the bank, so we made our appointment! Midwest Basement Systems will be coming September 9th.  We just need to do a few things to get ready before they come:

1) Clean the basement out.  Completely.

2) Break up the slab and haul it out.

3) Run plumbing for the bathroom, kitchenette, and washer.

4) Seal off a few windows.

5) Put in an egress window.

6) Put in a post to extend the stairs.  (We'll wait to re-work the stairs until after the floor is done.)

So, you know...just a few things.  No big deal.  Ha.

Before we really got started on demo (we had done some cleaning out, although it's hard to tell) I took some pictures of our starting point.

Tim had the guys over to play x-box on Friday night... and to help remove a few larger items and start breaking up the slab.

BTTJ's in the making...Colin and Sam do not mess around

I left for aqua zumba while they were still getting the washer and dryer out.  When I came back, the home theater room looked like this:

I should have provided more scale, but the picture below is intended to illustrate how thin the slab was.

This is what my breakfast nook now looks like.

#real life

We're working on hooking up the washer and dryer in here, since it will be a couple of months before they're in their permanent home downstairs.

This is the front porch.

Life just got a lot crazier, but we need to keep moving so we're ready by September 9th.  I'll do my best to bring you along for the ride.  Check in for weekly updates on our progress!  And say a prayer for us....