Utility Room

We have an older home that my girlfriend purchased from her parents. The house has needed tons of work and I have kept quite busy for the last year. Last month I finally got around to cleaning up the basement a bit. It was dark, dingy, and loaded with junk leftover from my girlfriends 4 older siblings. Water damage, cob webs, dirt, dust, pet hair, you name it, it was down there. In a word “yuck!” If you’ve ever seen the movie “Saw” then you know what I am talking about. Every time I walked down there I expected to see someone chained up to the laundry tub. My girlfriend was literally scared to go into the basement of the home she grew up in.

So, I began in the beginning of October, lots of cleaning and moving stuff. I then reconfigured some of the existing walls to enclose a room around the laundry area. And I built a closet and work surface with areas for storage bins. I trimmed it out with some scrap lumber I had from a demolition job and had to build a new door frame. I was doing all of this as a suprise for my girlfriend so I had to be a bit sneaky about things. I actually reused old drywall and studs from existing walls. This was quite a task because her older brothers thought it was a good idea to shoot bb’s into the walls, Lot’s of skim coating. (I saved all the bb’s I removed and plan to shoot them into hers brother the next time I see them.)

I probably spent the better part of a day pulling crap out of the ceiling, like old phone wires and random fasteners. I must have pulled about 300 feet old of phone wire out. They must of had 2-3 phones in every room. I then Painted the ceiling with a black latex, made by glidden for that purpose. I had to buy an additive to mix with the latex to run it through my sprayer, it worked well. I painted some old flourescent fixtures I had in the garage and installed them.

I painted the walls with left over paint I’d had from other jobs. I just mixed all the half full white cans I had in a five gallon bucket and went to work. Bought a floor painting kit, and painted the trim with some left over opaque grey stain. I painted her old concrete laudry tub too, and cleaned up the old fixtures. Also built some cabinets we picked up at home depot, had to bolt em together and build a platform beneath to level em out.

After all was said and done the job cost about 400 bucks, if you don’t include the odd stuff i used from my own stockpiles. Take out the $216 we spent on cabinets and the job was done for under $200.

When I finally took her down there to see it she cried. It is good to be appreciated.