The Basement Part 4: Drywall

The drywall stage is taking FOR-EV-ER. A few weeks ago we had a pipe burst in our wall TWICE and because of this, our project has been set back. In the meantime, we have decided to replace all the copper pipes in our house, most of which had recently been drywalled over in the basement. The silver lining is, this all happened before we started plastering so we were at least able to simply unscrew the drywall from the laundry room to expose the pipes.

Here is the laundry room almost all drywalled and ready to be plastered. (Yes, our washer and dryer are installed on the wrong side).

And now, the laundry room with new drywall taken down to access pipes. This is definitely a motivation killer.

All of the damage was to our production room (home for the printer and future built in work desk) so we had to cut out all the saturated gyprock from the wall and part of the ceiling, simultaneously exposing the pipes that needed to be fixed. This brought the production room from being pretty much done to not done at all. Sad face.

We almost have the issue under control though so back to the basement.

The studio side is almost finished. We can finally get a good idea of the size of each room and I am getting more excited about the finishings. Once plastering begins, we can order our floor, furniture, cabinets and new studio gear. Now normally we would tackle this whole project as a DIY, however, since the basement is so freaking massive and Chris works full time, we are planning to hire a painter-plasterer to mud everything so we can finish up this project sooner. Money well spent!

We left the most complicated cut pieces until last. It took us most of an evening to get the few pieces of drywall up in the stairwell and around the door. Precisely cutting out those stairs and lights wasn't much fun, but we took our time and didn't have too many screw ups. We love the look of stair tread directly meeting drywall with no stringer, which is why we're doing it this way.

One of the walls in the studio will be covered in custom built-in cabinets for loads of needed storage. The entrance to our crawlspace is on this wall as well. Chris and I plan on putting the bottom half of the centre cabinet on wheels so it will pull out when we need access to the crawl space. Most of the things under there are seasonal anyway so we won't need to be accessing it all the time.

We have a bit more drywall to put up around the posts and a couple of pieces in the top half of the stairwell. Hopefully we can motivate ourselves to finish this up over the next week or two so we can get this place plastered, painted and finished! Fingers crossed.