The communication has been a bit slow, I know – lack of anything to post lately along with the holidays. So today I wanted to give a quick update on the basement progress. For those following along I mentioned last month that I was finishing our basement. Although it has very little to do with personal finance, I am sharing the progress just for your enjoyment. So the story is that Hope has been on me for 5 years to get the basement finished. I of course didn’t want to spend the money. But as with everything she finally won the battle.
My thoughts were that as long as I was agreeing to finish the basement I would at least try to save a few dollars along the way. Here is a quick summary of where we are at:
- had the HVAC folks run the ventilation and motorized damper $2200
- carpentry to frame out the vents (tray ceilings) $1000
- insulate walls and ceilings $600
- plumb the water lines for bath / wetbar $1100
- electrical $1500
- sheetrock $3300
- primer / ceiling paint $250
- floors $5000 (ouch!)
So around $15k right now invested and that will at least give us a finished guest room and playroom. My entertainment room will be a bit longer to complete. I was looking for areas that I could do myself to save some money, but after second thought I decided that plumbing and electrical needed to be done by pros that could knock it out in a couple of days. If I tried to tackle it I would probably still be working on it. I have also tried hanging and finishing sheetrock before, but I was smart enough this time to sub it out. That takes talent and a strong back. I did install the insulation which is another nasty job. That fiberglass is challenging stuff to work with. I went ahead and insulated all the interior walls and ceilings to cut down on noise. That is one of my biggest pet peeves with home construction is that sound carries throughout all the interior rooms because there is no insulation inside the walls.
I knew the floors were going to be one of the costliest items. I did my research though and actually saved about $1000 by comparison shopping on the web. I was just about to order through one of the major wood flooring stores on the web and at the last minute found a store in Alpharetta called SimpleFloors that had a real nice wide plank hand scraped wood floor that looked great. I opted to do the install myself, which I am now having second thoughts about. It is tedious work installing glue down wood floors. It is after 10pm on Monday and I just finished the first room. I would estimate it took me at least 8 hours to complete. Let’s see if my math is correct that room was about 200 sq foot. I only have 1100 sq feet to go! At this rate I should finish sometime around New Years. So much for having the basement finished before the holidays!
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.