Basement Progress

I know it has been a while since I posted about the basement. But - we are getting really close to completion folks!

Last time I left you, we had just finished adding drywall to the ceiling and walls. You can see particularly on the ceiling that there were some serious seams between the drywall pieces.

Well, since then, a whole lot of mudding and taping occurred (thanks dad)! That involved a lot of time on my dad's part, much of it up on stilts, like this (he's actually putting up tape in the photo, not mud):

And you should know, ladies and gentlemen, that this is NOT easy. I gave it a try and ended up with taping compound all over the floor (and all over me too). Thankfully, my dad is basically a pro at this, so we ended up with smooth smooth walls!

The next step was adding the knock-down texture on the ceiling. The trickiest part was actually the prep. We taped off the ceiling with paper and painter's tape (you can see it in the above photo). We used a fun little gadget to apply the tape and paper at the same time:

Then we added thin plastic to cover the walls and thicker plastic to cover the floor. My mom helped out a lot with this part too.

Gizmo thought the plastic was great fun. He kept running around between the wall and the plastic!

Adding the texture was fairly simple. We used a texture sprayer with an air compressor and added in the taping compound. The spray was applied slowly and evenly, and after waiting for it to dry for about 20 minutes, we used a knockdown knife to flatten out the bumps (of course I forgot to take any photos of this part). Next we had to put 2-3 coats of primer on the ceiling and 1 coat on the walls. Here I'm adding primer to the wall and ceiling corner. The ceiling texture is there, but hard to see at this point (especially with all the drywall dust on the camera lens).

We thought (and argued) a LOT about what colors to paint the walls in the family room and bedroom. The final decision was to paint the family room the cork color from Behr and have a morocco red accent wall along the fire place. We wanted something coordinating, but not too matchy for the bedroom, and ended up going with grass cloth. We are thisclose to finishing the painting. I'll update again soon to show you how our color choices actually look on the walls. For now, this will give you an idea.