We were planning to remodel our basement, but not quite yet.

We bought our house with a finished basement - at least, they claimed it was finished.  It even looked finished, at first glance.  But since that time we have come to realize that we will probably have to do everything, except for the new bathroom (we hope), over.

We've lived here two years, and during that time, we've had water leak out of the air conditioner four times.  The HVAC is located in an unfinished utility room, just on the other side of what we have been using for our children's playroom.  One of the first projects I did after we moved in was paint a huge mural of a farm scene on three walls of this room.  One of the walls has now been saturated at least four times with water from the AC. 

The playroom (and most of the basement) is carpeted with a tan shag rug.  It has now been soaked through numerous times.  But this time was the worst.

This time, it seems that the air conditioner actually froze up, causing us to have the biggest puddle of water ever to seep through the wall and into the carpet, pad and concrete below.  It also spread out across the playroom floor, getting an expensive farm-design area rug wet, and ruining books and toys.

And, because we didn't catch it for who knows how many days because we have been so busy landscaping outside... all that wet stuff began to grow mold.  The whole basement stinks like mold.

If you aren't familiar with the problems mold can cause, they are primarily respiratory related. People can develop an allergy to mold, causing sinus and bronchial problems, and it is especially bad for people with asthma (like me).  And it's even worse for pregnant women (like me). 

So what can be done?  Well, the mold has to be removed.  I am not going to risk leaving even one spore of mold down there to be given the chance to multiply if ever the conditions are favorable again.  And we've done all we can to make sure this never happens again, namely by having the air conditioner repaired and recharged. 

But more importantly, we are going to remodel the basement correctly this time.  The previous owners did not use treated lumber for the floor plate of the stud walls.  They did raise the drywall high enough off the floor.  And they did not use a vapor barrier under the carpet.  Frankly, using carpet in the basement at all was a bad choice in and of itself. 

Here's what we (especially my DH) will do:

STEP ONE - MOLD REMOVAL

- Remove all carpeting and pad.

- Throw out furniture that got wet and/or mold on them (we don't have any pieces we really loved down there anyway)

- Cut off the part of the wall that got wet.  Drywall with mold growing on it has to be removed. The non-treated lumber bottom plates have to be replaced with treated, and so will any of the studs that got wet. 

- Scrub the floor with Spic-n-Span, and rinse (Spic-n-Span has no ammonia so it's safe to use in conjunction with the next step of mold removal)

- Scrub the floor with bleach water and allow it to stand wet for 15 minutes

- Dry the floor completely using dehumidifiers, fans, and all the AC vents open

STEP TWO - Remodeling the Basement Correctly

- Replace the wet wood and walls with new studs (little frames inside of the existing stud wall to replace the sections we cut out)

- Replace the drywall we removed

- Paint over my mural, since it's now pretty much ruined anyway.   This will mean a good coat of primer, and probably a couple coats of a nice warm gold color

- Install bead-board style paneling on the lower part of the wall as wainscoting.  Paint this white.

- Install white chair rail to finish this off.

- Install laminate floor using a vapor barrier which will go up the sides of the walls a couple of inches, hidden under the baseboards.

STEP THREE - FINISHING TOUCHES TO OUR CORRECTLY FINISHED BASEMENT

One of the reason we lost some of the kids' toys and books to the water and mold was that their playroom was horribly disorganized.  Even though we had installed lots of shelves, they didn't have an appreciation for where things were supposed to go, or that you should put things away when you're done with them.

In fact, they probably never play with 3/4 of their toys because they are sets that lost parts and pieces and don't work without them, etc. 

So this time, the playroom shelf system will be modified.  I want to put in stock cupboards from Lowe's or Home Depot, and install locks on them, to store the nicer games or sets of things (like dominoes), as well as kids arts and crafts supplies.  This way, I can control when the kids are allowed to have crayons and markers, in hopes of saving my newly painted basement walls.

I also want to move a table that is currently sitting in what is supposed to be our kitchen nook, to the basement.  It is an old, round oak table that was originally from a preschool, but in the nook it just gets covered with junk instead of being a good place for the kids to play and do art.  Hopefully in the basement it will give them a nice surface to play on, set puzzles, etc. 

Another strategy is to use lower cupboards to store toys.  If they cannot see so many toys at any given moment, maybe they won't take EVERYTHING out at once.  If necessary, we can lock these cupboards up too, and just leave a portion of their toys out on open shelves at any given time.  It'll be like Christmas when we take out a new batch of toys (meanwhile stashing away the ones that were out previously).

We are also going to install a TV on a bracket in the corner of the room, rather than having an entertainment center piece of furniture taking up space in there (and one less thing to worry about in case water ever does spill in there again).  All in all, this remodeled basement playroom will be brighter, less cluttered, have more kid-friendly furniture in it, and will be a safe place for the kids to play: mold-free!

Posted by Caeli at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What can you do if you have a really small kitchen, but can't afford to do a major kitchen remodel, such as knocking down any walls or doing an addition to your home?

Well, you make the most of what you have.  We gave that little kitchen a complete makeover.

This is what we ended up with:

In our case, we had a small L-shaped kitchen in tiny rectangular room which had three doorways going into it, and two windows.  The refrigerator was tucked into a nook at right angles to the hinges of the back door, which meant if you had the fridge open, no one could come in (likewise if someone had the back door open, you had to shut it to get to the refrigerator).

The kitchen floor plan was roughly like this:

That empty space under the window on the back door wall was never actually empty.  When we looked at the house before we bought it, the people who owned the place had a cart with a microwave and all kinds of junk piled up there. (I don't think these people ever watched Design to Sell or anything like it.)  When we moved in, we stuck a small drop-leaf table there for a while and I think we used that for our microwave.

The first thing we knew we had to do was replace the refrigerator.  The one that came with the house was nasty.  But when our new refrigerator was delivered, we discovered a problem: it was too big to fit in the nook the old refrigerator had occupied.  We considered knocking down the wall adjoining the hallway that formed the side of the nook, but we thought it might be load-bearing and didn't want to mess around with it.  We thought about shaving down the walls or putting in paneling instead of sheetrock to give us a little more room.  But then the delivery man said, "why don't you get a smaller refrigerator?"  Duh.  I guess we had thought we were buying the smallest one, but nope, they came smaller.  So we did as he suggested, and were quite happy with our new refrigerator, which we hooked up to the reverse-osmosis drinking water system we had installed.  Awsome ice water!

There was one casualty when we got a new refrigerator though.  Namely, the cabinet that was above the old refrigerator.  The new unit was taller than the old one, and no standard cabinet would fit there.  The old cabinet was installed in such a way that the only way to remove it was with a reciprocating saw.  then we patched and painted the walls, and put a big rectangular basket on top of the refrigerator where I stored plastic wrap and aluminum foil and the like.  It worked out just fine.

The oak finish cabinets looked almost new, but there were not many of them.  The laminate countertops weren't so great.  The vinyl floor was ugly.  We had had all the hardwoods refinished in the rest of the house, which made the kitchen floor look even worse. 

We wanted to utilize that wall with the window as a third section of counters and cabinets, a perfect place to add a dishwasher.  The one problem that kept us stalled for a while was the height of the window.  It was lower than the standard height of countertops.  We didn't know how to make the opening of the window smaller because the exterior of the house was nice red brick, how would we ever make it look right? 

So what did we do?  Well, we added the third length of countertops and the dishwasher, with even a couple more upper and lower cabinets and a little spot on the end by the door with a stool tucked under it as a place to sit.  The layout now looked like this:

and as for that low window... we just cut off the sill and otherwise ignored it.  It's an old house.  Consider it one of its quirks that the window goes behind the countertop a little.  That happens to be the only window in the house that we did not replace with vinyl windows.  We didn't think an installer would go for it, so we just didn't want to raise the issue.

Luckily, by the way, we found the exact same cabinets that were already installed in the kitchen in stock at Home Depot, so we were able to keep the existing one and add matching ones, including a corner cabinet with a glass door to show off my Port Merion china collection. 

We had an industrial vinyl floor installed.  It was off-white in color, kind of a parchment-paper texture.  It was so easy to clean, and made the kitchen look so much bigger!

We also replaced the old stainless sink with a new almond-colored one (to match the refrigerator and our new dishwasher!), added a faucet coming from the drinking water system, and installed a new stove, replacing the old electric range with a gas one. 

We got hung up a little bit on putting in a microhood.  The problem was, there were soffits above the old bank of cabinets, and Home Depot didn't have a cabinet short enough to install above the microhood while allowing the microwave to be installed at a proper height above the stove.  So we went down the street to Lowes, where we were able to find a shorter cabinet that looked close enough to the rest of our cabinets.  Now the microwave was off the countertops, giving us even more working area, plus a nice bright spot in the kitchen with a white stove and white microhood, with nice lights shining down on the stove. 

It had become a very sensible, well-layed-out and user-friendly kitchen with just the right amount of storage.

As far as the decor, I used a combination of wallpaper and paint technique.  This is where I mastered my favorite faux-painting technique:

mix a little paint with a little glaze

pour it into a roller pan

wear plastic gloves

scrunch up a plastic grocery or department-store bag and dip it in the paint, blotting it on newspapers

pounce the paint-covered plastic bag on the walls.

Of course, I started by rolling on a neutral base coat, and used a dark tan-colored paint for the first layer, then took an almost-beige tan color for the next coat, finally pouncing on a thin coat of off-white glaze which really unified the look.

The colors were chosen to match  the wallpaper.  I used a tile-and-flowers design paper in place of a backsplash, and I placed the matching border on top of my faux-painted soffits.  Using both paint and wallpaper kept the cost of the wallpaper down in there. 

We remodeled that whole kitchen for less than $2,000.  We did most of it ourselves (with the abundant help of my family), except for installing the gas stove and vinyl floor.  By keeping the appliances mid-grade, sticking with the stock cabinetry that was already installed and just adding a few more cabinets, and going with laminate countertops again (but this time they coordinated perfectly with the rest of the decor) we were able to get a really nice kitchen that didn't price us out of the market when it was time to sell.

In fact, that kitchen was a LOT nicer than the kitchen in the house we now have moved into, and I have plans for remodeling this kitchen too, but that is a whole other story.

Posted by Caeli at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)