"Before" pictures of the basement

The house came with a finished basement, but it was definitely not finished to our tastes. We're almost finished tearing it all out, but here are some pictures of what it was like when we bought it. The walls were covered with tongue-in-groove knotty pine panelling, one wall is a brick fireplace, the other end is a bar, and it had the cheapest dropped ceiling ever.


Looking down the stairs to the basement, it was so dark it felt like we were entering a dungeon.


Here's the view looking down one end of the main room. There used to be a window on that wall, but it was covered up when a previous owner installed the fireplace. I'd really like to tear down the fireplace and replace the window (and the window in the main floor bedroom that was also covered up by the chimney), but we'll see how much that will cost. You can also see the dropped ceiling here. The rails were just kind of tied to the joists - not very stable. And they're fiberglass tiles, so we had to be careful taking them down.


Here's the view looking the other way. Seth found that parts of the wall fell down pretty easily. In the back is a bar that Jollyman liked to hide behind (by the way, he's very upset that he's no longer allowed in the basement and gets mad at anyone who goes down and doesn't let him down).


I had already torn down the bottom half of this wall when I took the picture, but you can see how they kind of mixed and matched the panelling in the basement, and not necessarily lined up. Nothing was attached very well, either - most of it just kind of came off the framing with a gentle tug. It made demolition easier, but didn't seem to be the best construction.


I'll post some more later of the "demolition" stage of the basement.

First posting on our new blog

I finally set up our house renovation blog. Here our friends and family and guests can read about our many renovations. You can see the slow progress we’ll make, comment on our work, give suggestions, and travel with us from a fixer-upper to a gem.

We moved in to the house in August after house-shopping for a few months. We’re just inside the DC beltway, which is nice being close to everything. It would have been nice to find an affordable house in Chevy Chase or Georgetown, but we are in a nice neighborhood, and close to the metro. I do go through moments where I miss living in Ellicott City, but houses were too much for us there and it was time for us to stop paying someone else rent and buy our own place.

We’ve started a little bit of demolition, but have tons of work ahead of us. We've hired an architect, and hope that she will be able to give us great ideas of what to do to the house. We aren’t always sure what the best approach would be to improve a space, so hopefully a professional can keep us in the right direction. Once we have plans, we’d like to do most of the work ourselves. We’ll leave stuff like plumbing and electrical to experts, but almost everything else we can do. Seth knows how to do a lot of it, and I’ll be learning as I go.

We have quite a laundry list of things to accomplish to turn this house around. It was built in the 40s, with much of the original work still in it, and I don’t think it’s been updated at all since the 80s. A lot of the stuff that was done to house was done without rhyme or reason, and it all desperately needs updating. We’re redoing each of the three floors, want to do a some work to the exterior of the house, and have to completely tear out and re-landscape the lawn. That’s a lot of work ahead of us - wish us luck!

- Kristin and Seth