The Plan

We have a plan. A plan for our basement, that is. In fact, here it is now:

The right side of the drawing is the front of the house. The music room will be roughly square, with a notch taken out of the upper left corner for the small room where our furnace, hot water heater, and laundry basket will be. (We have a laundry chute on the second floor that drops down to this basket; and yes, it is totally sweet.)

The wine room will be long and narrow. We plan to have a bar in there, plus a nice sink/countertop area. And booze. Did we mention booze? Oh. We did. Sorry.

There'll be a small laundry area for the washer & drier (and litter box). The rest of the basement will be a hallway and some storage space at the bottom of the stairs.

Our thanks to CAD Monkey for the lovely job on the plan.

Welcome

I am not a handy person. Laura, my better half, is not a handy person.

Now, don't get me wrong. I can change a light bulb with the best of 'em. Heck, I even changed the handle on our front door, a task that required the use of no fewer than 3 or 4 different tools. In general, however, me with a hammer in my hand is an idea on par with lighting up at a gas station.

With that in mind, we recently approach our good friend, the handsome and talented Ken (note: not the doll), to aid us in our quest for a fully finished basement. God bless him, he doesn't always make the best decisions, and good thing too, because he said yes!

Now, those of you who have seen our house may ask, "Why do you need a finished basement? You've got plenty of room in that house!" I will forgive for a moment the impertinence of your question. There are a few answers:

• Laura has a crippling fear of spiders. The combination of Portland, OR + an unfinished basement = Spider Disneyland.
• Eric has an abiding and embarrassing love of making loud music, as Laura and our neighbors can attest to. While Laura and said neighbors have been gracious beyond all reasonable bounds in regards to this public nuisance, finishing our basement affords Eric the opportunity to have the sound-proofed music room that he has coveted for years.
• Laura has also spearheaded the effort to make sure that our basement plan includes what we have been grandly referring to as a "wine cellar", but in reality will be a "room where people can drink". Yes, we acknowledge that this makes it similar to every other room in our house. But did we mention it's in the basement?
• And, last but not least, we can finally put the cat litter box in the basement, out of sight from polite company and visiting dignitaries. The basement has been off-limits to the kitties thus far, due to their propensity to go down there and lick strange substances on the walls.
  

We thought it would be fun to capture the progress of our basement project in pictures. Then a thought occurred to us: are we really prepared to deprive the world of the excitement of following along with us on this wild and woolly home-improvement journey? No, we said! We are not made of stone, after all. So, here for your reading pleasure is a chronicling of one couple's journey from wine cellar-less cretins to hip urban sophisticates. Forget everything you know about....I don't know, stuff.