For the past 2 years Shelly and I have undertaken the enormous task of finishing our basement. By “the past 2 years” I mean, “we started 2 years ago”. The plan was to finish the basement and remodel the upstairs, guest bathroom all at the same time AND all before Hannah was born. But like most plans, things never seemed to work out as designed.

As background, when Shelly and I bought our rambler-style house in Burnsville back in 2000 we knew about a few crawl spaces surrounding the basement. One under the master bedroom, another under the addition in the back of the house, and a third under the adjacent areas of the 2 upstairs guest bedrooms and guest bathroom. We discovered about a year after living in the house that the crawl space under the bedrooms/bathroom wasn’t 3 feet high like the other crawl spaces, but instead was fully excavated to the basement’s foundation, making the height of the space ~8 feet. The only entrance into the space was a small 2′ x 2′ screened window, which lead to 500 sq. feet of empty dirt floor which was riddled with cast iron plumbing for the upstairs bathroom.

After a couple of years of dragging our feet on making a decision on what to do (if anything) with the space, we finally decided to transform the area into 2 legal bedrooms and a bathroom. And because all of the plumbing for the upstairs bathroom was above ground in the crawl space below, and thus needed to be replaced/moved, we naively decided to ‘gut’ and remodel the bathroom at the same time. Our thinking was that while the house was ‘under construction’ we might as well get it all done at the same time. Little did we know that do-it-yourself projects of this magnitude too more than ‘a couple of weeks’ to get done.

My next few blog entries will detail the steps taken for each of the projects over the past 2 years.