Basement

It turns out that I'm not a very prolific blogger. My posts are few and far between, especially lately. I haven't posted anything since our Italy trip this August! But so much has happened since then! Of course, number 1 is that baby #4 is on it's way! We're so excited about that! The girls really want a little brother but we shall see. Another big exciting event was that Daniel and Niki moved to Spangereid! So that's been tons of fun and we're really enjoying getting to be with them and really be an aunt/uncle/cousins to their 2 little cuties. And the 3rd big thing that's not quite as pleasant is that my back decided really to just...give up. So I've really had to set limits for myself to get through this pregnancy. Good news is I'm almost half way! Woot!

Anyway, to the point. We've been working on the house when we have time and money. Right at the beginning of Sept we finished Rebecca's room. She had been sharing a room with Emilie since we moved in so both were very happy when Becca's room was finished. Sindre was off shore for the better part of October and November but when he got back, they started full swing on our basement.
It went pretty fast actually. There's still stuff left to be done. We haven't installed the wood stove yet and we're still missing the trims and small details. And we haven't even started on the guest room and storage room down there. But the goal was to get the family room done. And mission accomplished.

When you sit down here now it's almost hard to imagine how it looked before. Let's suffice it to say that there is a whole lot of work and pure determination behind the finished product.

Here is a little reminder of how it looked before we started the renos. This is the guest room which is still unfinished but it shows you how the original stone walls looked.

And this is a part of our now family room. This picture shows the kitchen cupboards that were down here. They are original to the house that stood before this house was built on the same foundation. This is house was built in 1929 so these cupboards are from some point in the 1800's. We wanted to save them but they were too eaten up by wood worm. 

The basement was absolutely FULL of stuff. It was cold and musty, smelled bad, had extremely uneven floors, and the only way into it was to go out of the house and through a set of stairs from the outside.

First we had to dig a new basement that would connect to the old one and go under the new extension.

Then, by sheer muscle power, the guys dug up the basement floor with sledgehammers and carried out the rubble, bucket by bucket. We needed to dig down a bit to gain a little ceiling height, to put in the in-floor heating cables, and to pour a new, LEVEL concrete floor.

After that we didn't do a lot of work down there. Sindre put in all the wiring for the electrics and we had to finish the floor in the new part of the basement so that they could install the staircase. So it was like that until just a few weeks ago.

The guys starting to install the floor and white wash the walls:

And as of today, it looks like this. 

We love it already. We're pleased that there's lots of space, the ceiling height is good and it turned out like we wanted. And we've already tested it out with a movie night with Daniel and Niki last night. We'll be opening all our gifts down here on Christmas Eve. Can't wait to put a tree up and make it Christmasy. :)