David R Storms.com

Thought this was funny. Site takes a while to load for what you get, but at least it has pleasant music while you design your madmen.

http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/madmenyourself/

Update: July-20-2009, here are pics of the completed bathroom walls!

Original post:

The project continues! First we put down the Dri-core system flooring and built the walls on top of that. After the flooring went down it seemed to transform the basement!

Below you can see the wall and rough-in plumbing where our bathroom will be. I plan on making a wall just before the window and extending out to the I-beam, and then following it to complete the wall and incorporate the jack-post. The door will be on this wall, facing the window direction.

Below we have the door framed in for entrance into the furnace/storage room. It follows the I-beam and will hide the drain pipe you see in the middle. Beside it there is the closet that sticks out about a foot.

Excuse the mess! But here you can see the closet that we built at the end of the stairs.

This is a good shot of the Dri-core flooring from the middle of the basement.

One of my favourite parts of this basement project is the office! It will of course be a potential bedroom, here is a shot from the doorway.

We have a 5 foot closet in the corner for some extra storage.

Here is a better exterior shot of the doorway and into the office.

Up Next: Still some more framing to do for the bathroom walls, then that’s all done.

Special thanks on the project thus far go out to my brother-in-law, my sister, and my two nieces who sacrificed a Saturday to get all this done with me; they are the best!

After that I plan on tackling the plumbing and electrical before the messy drywall stage!

In case you missed part 1, you can click back to it here.

Last Sunday I noticed something strange on our back deck. There was a rather colourful bird there. I didn’t really know what it was so I called my wife Laura over to look at it and she wasn’t sure either. She opened the door and called to the bird and it jumped closer. That said to us that it was domesticated and not a wild bird.

I quickly pulled our my iPhone and Googled “bird yellow head orange cheeks” and within seconds found out it was a Cokatiel.

Since we had no cage we started calling our friends. Luckily, my friend John’s parents had one and he brought it over and with oven mits in hand got the bird into the cage.

My wife and I were babysitting our nieces that weekend and they were dropped off at the same time too. They are 4 and were excited to see the bird. They gave it the name of “Rainbow Pony” and had fun feeding it some bread.

We have never taken care of a bird and learned that these kinds of birds really like company, that we couldn’t provide. So we called the humane society and they were able to take the bird in. They told us that nearby a family lost a Cokatiel but they got it back, plus in another town there was another bird (again a Cokatiel) lost but it was recovered also.

I gave a donation to them (although it was not required of course) to thank them for helping the bird. I don’t know if the owners have been found or not but they were going to give the bird up for adoption if they couldn’t be found.

If you happen to be in the Lindsay, Ontario area and are the owner of a lost Cokatiel, give the Humane Society a call.

Since our raised bungalow only had 2 bedrooms upstairs, we decided to take advantage of the blank slate which was our basement in order to create that third bedroom and a new living area. We were also keeping our mind set on resale and thinking it would best to have that extra room. The intention is to keep the basement as flexible as possible putting walls in natural locations and leaving it open for someone else to change.

Part 1 of this series is the before pictures of the basement.

This is the front corner of the house. That window is at ground level. Beside it is the under side of the stairs going to the main level. It is about 10 feet from wall to wall and just off the picture on the right side is another window. This is the location of the bedroom that we are going to purpose as an office.

Here is a look from in front of the window above looking down the wall. The wall will be at the second stud before that window at around 12 feet. We plan on adding a closet to this room as well. At the far end by the other window we plan to put the living space, TV, couches, etc.

From the same spot, but looking in the other direction, you can see the rest of the main area. We will have only 1 jack post to deal with as the other two will be incorporated into walls. In the far corner it will be open, and beside were you see the black pipe next to the jack post will be where we put our bathroom.

Walking to the other end of the basement, you can see the wall where the bathroom will be. In the corner will be stand up shower, and along the wall will be the toilet and sink. The wall for the room will end a foot or so before the window you see on the top left.

On the other side of the bathroom will be our furnace room. The duct on the right is inset into the wall from the stairs just off to the right of the picture creating a void where we will put a closet. After that we will frame in a door and create a wall in line with the jack post just to the left of the drain pipe you see on the left side.

Flooring

We are going to use the Dri-core product on the floor. I never liked cold basement floors, so this will provide the thermal break, plus keep it dry because it is a floating floor and is covered with plastic on the one side.

Walls

Simple, just covering with dry wall. As you can see from most of the picture the bottom half of the walls are insulated and stand out to create a shelf so we will maybe come up with a nice looking ledge for that.

Ceiling

May not get to the ceiling right away, but we are planning on a suspended ceiling. I prefer these in basements as it leaves easy access to the floor for the main floor for any purpose (running extra wire, inspecting tub cleanouts, etc) not to mention any water leaks does not cause a lot of damage; easy to replace a single tile rather than a lot of soaked dry wall.

That’s if for part 1. As I write this we have the flooring almost done and the framing fairly close, so look for part 2 soon!