Almost There....

Hey everyone! We have had a REALLY productive week with the basement and I wanted to share our progress. We are 4 walls away from finishing framing the walls, and we have already started the soffits. It's definitely a slowly but surely project, but sometimes weeks like this pop up and it feels like we have come such a long way!

For reminders, here are the befores:

And here is where we are currently at:

This is where the living room will be. It's currently the cutting area, and we let the kids play with the pile of extra blocks to make castles.

Here's a look at the south side of the hallway. This wall was a BEAR to build, and fit inside the room we built it in by about 4 inches, but my awesome hubby got it up and did a great job! This side has the entrance to the storage room (currently a.k.a. THE MESS) and the craft room.

Here's a look at the north side of that same hallway. Entrance to the bathroom (still to be built after tub is installed,) linen closet, and kids' playroom.

This is the bathroom. It's 6 feet wide, so we are debating between putting a 6 ft. long tub, or a 5 ft. long tub with a *small* storage space next to it. Thoughts, anyone?

Here is the kiddos' playroom. They are so excited! This is also what remains of our GIANT wood pile we had when we started this project. Might need to go shopping soon for some more wood...

This is the closet in the kiddos' room. It's pretty deep, with plenty of room for shelving inside. You can also see the entrance to the water heater closet. We still need to build the door headers on this wall.

This little nook ended up being kind of a surprise design. We had originally planned on having the kids' room and craft room doors both at a 45 degree angle to reflect what we have upstairs, but we couldn't figure out a way to make that secure enough to stay up so we had to make the kids' room a regular 90 degrees and ended up with this fun little nook. Big Man E wants to make this his "lego" area, most likely though at first it will be IKEA shelving.

Here is the entrance to the craft room I had to take a picture of this spot because I am SO PROUD of the 45 degree angle doorway that I cut the wood for all by myself. This room is HUGE and we have some awesome plans for it!

This is the closet in my craft room. The doors are 6 feet wide and it's 40 inches deep. Can we say, MASSIVE?! I think Harry Potter would be happy to live there. Hopefully it will be enough room for all of my crafty stuff/photography gear/sewing stuff etc....

This is another surprise nook we ended up with. We had to move the door to the storage room and ended up with this little nook area. My hubby is VERY excited about it, as am I. Plans for this nook include 2 docking stations for laptops with at least one using a dual monitor setup. This way hubby can work from home and LOCK THE DOOR so kids (and I) don't bug him while he is working, and we both can use a computer at the same time. Maybe a LAN party here and there too will be in order....

Last pic for now, this is the linen closet in the hallway. I have actually toyed with the idea of me and hubby moving downstairs and having all the kids upstairs since the rooms down here are so massive and going to be so beautiful. Maybe someday when they are grown, I just don't think I could give up my soaker tub :) 

So far we have done ALL of the framing ourselves, my dad helping and hubby and I at about 90% of the framing. We used the amazing videos from http://basementfinishingvideos.com  to learn how to do it and it has been a huge blessing. We did have to adjust the techniques to account for the floating walls required in the state of Colorado but for the most part it is the same. We are hoping to work on the soffits this week and maybe even get the bathtub in place so we can frame the rest of the bathroom. After we are 100% done with the framing I am planning a video walkthrough, so stay tuned!