Did you think we'd given up on our fixer-upper house? It's been a minute since I've shared any updates.

We definitely have not given up, it's just sometimes very slow going. Trying to fit in time to work on it is hard sometimes. I still have a full-time day job plus we were trying to get our two previous houses ready to rent which involved a huge living estate sale that spanned two weekends, and a multitude of small but time-consuming maintenance items on both houses.

There's also just trying to enjoy our everyday lives and time together and with family. I helped my daughter downsize her storage unit and have a garage sale with everything she no longer wanted or needed. We went to a couple of concerts to see Santana and Earth Wind and Fire, and Tesla. We celebrated our 3-year dativersary and we've been enjoying our new swimming pool... it's been in the triple digits here lately 🔥

All that to say, we are still working on the fixer-upper! Our efforts lately have been concentrated on the basement. We can't clear off all the stuff piled on the back patio until we get the stuffed garage cleaned out and we can't clean out the garage until we get the basement done! 😂

Today, I'm sharing the progress we've made on the basement.

Progress on the Basement at the Fixer-Upper House

I created a video too.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a lot of good before pictures, but I'll share what I do have as we go along.

These before shots look pretty good but trust me, it wasn't that nice down here. This carpet was pretty bad, it had stains all over it.

The carpets in the little office room were even worse... it reeked in here because of the cat urine 😫

They had rubber baseboard moldings like you'd see in office buildings... I'm not sure why you'd choose that option... cost maybe? Or maybe because it's a basement and they were afraid of flooding? I'm not sure, but we went with traditional wood molding.

And then the asbestos tiles underneath.

Then we decided to have the wall that divides the small room from the rest of the basement removed. It was a load-bearing wall so we hired a contractor for this job.

Ideally, I would not have chosen to have posts in place of the wall but they would have had to either do major construction upstairs to install a support beam in the ceiling from the top down or have a beam that extended down about 9 inches... these ceilings are only 7 feet tall as is, so that wasn't an option.

We also had a whole new electrical panel put in because the old one has been banned.

Once all this major stuff was done, we were finally ready to start on the things we wanted to do ourselves.

First, I painted the little room that will be our gym. I used the same Polar Bear white by Behr that we have used in the whole rest of the house.

And I skim-coated the little wall that has the entry into the laundry room and small bathroom. Skim-coating means just putting a thin coat of drywall mud over the old, textured wall to create a smooth surface for wallpapering.

This was after one coat, I gave it two so it is nice and smooth now. Also, take note of that wall sconce. There are three of them in the basement and I've got a fun upcycle to share in a bit.

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Then we carpeted the gym area. We chose glue-down carpet tiles to save some money and we did this because this area is going to be a gym so we'll be getting down on the floor at times.

These are really easy to cut and install. You just score the back with a utility knife, bend it at that score mark, and then slice right through.

It took one gallon of carpet adhesive and three boxes of carpet tiles which cost about $300.

Then I painted the rest of the basement.

Once that was done, we could begin cleaning and prepping to paint the floors.

We primed and then painted with Behr Concrete and Garage Floor Paint which was about $42.

Then we waited and let it cure for about a week before we walked on it.

Here is a before picture that still has the carpet and the old fireplace.

That fireplace was old, the chimney is so full of creosote that it's almost completely plugged, and we just don't need a real fireplace down here so we sold the old one to our electrician for $100!

Here is the new vintage fireplace I got! It's a true 1960's vintage Heatilator that I found on Etsy from a shop called Unearthed Home. Then I purchased this electric log set to make it an electric fireplace!

We are going to build an entertainment center in this area where the closet is.

So we did some demoing and took out the centerpiece and the molding. We already have the base cabinets that we'll be using to build the new entertainment center.

And finally, remember that wall sconce? Here it is again.

We didn't really want to buy new ones because lighting can get expensive plus, I'm all about using what you already have when possible!

I cleaned these up and gave them a coat of black spray paint.

Then when I reinstalled them, I installed them pointing up instead of down and donated the old frosted glass tulip shades and replaced them with these black ombre glass shades from Lowe's!

We have moved our couch and area rug in, as well as the gym equipment. Here is what it looks like now.