Progress

Oh the mess.

There is simply no other word to describe our basement - especially the 'finished' side. Piles upon piles of stuff in need of organization and cleaning.

But I take a deep breath and remind myself that it's messy for a good reason. And I will share with you what that reason is: Progress.

In order for the damage caused by an improperly sealed chimney - which resulted in a flood in our basement during intense rain-for-a-week last fall - to be fixed, everything had to be moved out of one half of the basement into the other half. My washer and dryer are surrounded by mess and chaos. Ahhh! Driving me crazy! But (deep breath, Jen) it's all good. Because we are gettin' somewhere!

Here's where we started on inspection day almost two years ago:

Then came the rains. And the flood. And the STINK of molding carpet. Blech:

Then came the men. We hosted a "demolition night" at our house a few months back where we discovered more mold than we wanted to see. Slowly but surely the moldy stuff taken care of, we had everything torn out that we wanted to have torn out and we were down to studs:

And then Tim went to synod. And I ran with a plan to surprise my husband. Why not do it myself? So with the help of my dad we finished doing some framing and started to put up the drywall. A superbly helpful and very handy family from church actually came to help with the ceiling a mere 6 or so hours after I crazily phoned them asking for help (thank you SO much!!). We were mostly done by the time Tim came home and it was so FUN to watch the surprise on his face as he figured out what we accomplished in his absence. No pictures of his face, unfortunately, but I do have shots of the basement after our work:

And someone has come in to tape for us (again - so thankful - because wow, we probably would've made a big mess of that!!) and will be coming to sand it down soon.

Sweet, sweet progress. Can't WAIT to paint the room, get the flooring in, etc. We have exciting plans which may be including a sliding barn door...!! Stay tuned folks!! This project is gettin' somewhere.