Basement update!

Remember last time I wrote a basement update post and I thought the struggle with the doors was our "hurdle" for this project? FAMOUS LAST WORDS.

If you didn't catch me rambling about it on Instagram, here's how the door saga played out.

David went back to Menards, complained to the guys working at the time who responded "This is the first time we've ever had a complaint about this, we don't know what to tell you," and then they reluctantly gave us like $100 back in store credit.

After that (because I was still upset about it), I did some digging into contractor and home improvement internet forums and found out that it's an "industry secret" that pre-primed doors aren't really ready to paint when you get them home. Primer hardens past usability if it's left to sit for too long, and basically becomes what we encountered -- a super smooth, not-at-all-paintable surface.

WHY.

So any professional that uses pre-primed doors always coats with another coat of primer before painting (even if they're using paint and primer in one, which is what we used). So! Now we knew. Dumb that it's not just a common-knowledge thing, and that the people at Menards didn't even know that (or claimed not to), but we have info for the next time, at least.

always the jokester, is David

David stripped all the doors, repainted them with primer first and then another couple coats of our paint, and then installed them. They are GLORIOUS.

I really REALLY hated the door that was connecting this living side to the storage/laundry room before, because it was a fake handle and a flimsy hollow door and never really shut all the way, and the two closet doors in the picture above were super obnoxious too -- one of them had a weird black thing stuck to it for some reason? Having three wonderfully solid doors with normal handles that shut easily is fantastic now. It might be my favorite functional update we did down here.

We finished up painting and after going back and forth with indecisiveness for months, decided to just paint the stairwell and the kids' area the same gray (Sherwin Williams Peppercorn). Maybe we'll be itching for something more down the road, but for now it's great.

one day we'll find another screw for that faceplate...one day...

David also stripped down the handrail, repaired it with a (affiliate link ahead) little Feed N Wax, and spray painted the connecting hardware to match our intake vents.

Anyway, so after the doors were installed and the painting was done, we were ready for carpet!

one last look at the cheapest carpet known to mankind!

Carpet guys came out the day before Thanksgiving, and got all our old carpet out and new stuff installed within like 7 hours. It was fast and we were impressed when we walked around the first time -- it was definitely an improvement on what was there before (so squishy! so soft!). We left for the holiday weekend, and then when we got back and were living with it more and more, both of us kept noticing that you could feel little bits of hardened glue on the seams.

And not just in one place -- on all the long seams (it's a long, huge room, so lots of seams!) there were at least 6-10 spots where it was noticeable when you walked over it that something was wrong. I kept hoping in the back of my mind it'd eventually go away (laughable I know) but we finally called the installer to come out and check it out. The guy who showed up (not the original installers, someone higher up in the company) basically went pale and said it was almost the worst he'd ever seen or something like that. (Forgive the details getting muddy, I was holding Felix at the time and it was like a month ago.) That guy had to call the owners, and after a weekend waiting for him to call us back, he finally called and said they'd have to rip out the main stretch and reinstall everything. Which meant we had to take everything back out of the basement that we'd spent the previous full weekend organizing and prettifying. Le sigh.

Reluctantly David convinced them to work around our built-in storage that holds the kids' toy storage and the cabinet under the TV, so we didn't end up taking those out (thank goodness!) but everything else had to go.

The new installers came on January 15, and ended up actually taking out everything that was installed, replacing one of the main pieces with new carpet, and reused some of the other stuff in different sections. Happy to say now it all feels nice and much better than it did before! I can't find a single spot so I'm pleased with it, albeit still annoyed that we had to deal with all this extraneous stuff when the carpet was SUCH a big expenditure for us as it was.

It's disheartening to think you're finally spending money to have someone do some work for you, and then get met with shoddy work that forces you to do extra work and hassle and time. Say what you will about DIYing everything, but the only person you can be disappointed in is yourself -- and you can manage expectations pretty easily when you're the one doing everything. Ah well, lessons learned I suppose. DIY forever!!!

Okay enough blabbing for now.
I don't have "final" pictures taken yet, and hoping maybe that'll be this weekend's project now we have almost everything done. I'll spend a few months still tweaking everything to where I'm happy, but David's itching to get some closure on everything so I think I'll help him out and let us do a "finished mostly" photoshoot. That post will have sources for everything I can think of and a budget breakdown, too!

Thanks for being here, friends --
HG