Big Basement Plans

I have big dreams, big dreams for my basement.  Right now it is a little scary better than it used to be.  When we first moved in we had a basement that was crowded with the tenants stuff.  He had so much stuff that we did not even know that there were leeks in the steam heating.  The basement was wet, and dark, and crowded.  The day we moved in we paid to have all the stuff left over hauled away.  It was a gross job, and the poor guys had to work along side with the movers who were moving in all our stuff.

Once we got the basement dry we could think about cleaning it up.  In the fall my father-in-law installed some flooring to get us up off the concrete.  This made a huge difference.  Now we had a space to work with.

 Here you can see my father-in-law putting in the first pieces of the floor.  I did not get any after pictures (Not sure what happened at that point), but here is how we did it.  We got flooring that has plasic on the bottom in case more water comes in, this provides a little protection.  We hope to cover this floor with some carpeting in the future some time.

Speaking of dreams, we have a lot of dreams about our basement.  For now we have some outsdoor furniture in there to get it out of the weather.  So we made the room up to a little "living room trial run."

The problem is that the room became overrun with STUFF.  I had to move a bunch of my books and belongings out of storage and it ended up here:

What a mess.  I got a little overwhelmed and gave up for a while.  When I did attack it, I am quite proud of myself.  I got rid of three boxes of books (that is good for me).

I then proceeded to go upstairs and get rid of more books to make room for the ones I kept (inclusing a bunch of kids books from my childhood).

We moved down the dresser for the guestroom (I hope to have a full reveal in a couple of months) and made a little drinking station under the window.

I like having all my liquor in the basement.  It keeps them out of reach (and if I have to do too much laundry I have some relief right there with me, haha).

I'm not done yet, I have massive plans for this basement and my Pinterest board "Finished Basement Dreams" (more on that latter).