The monster of a basement

I've been meaning to start a blog since I moved to Alaska back in January 2012, but I never got around to it. Sometimes there is so much to be said... I might as well blog it.  Better to start now than never!

Back in January when John told me he wanted to finish the basement before we move- I didn't really think it would be that hard of a project.  At the time, I was more excited about painting a giant room than I was about all the other work that went into it.  John prioritized and bought a projector for the basement.  After all, if you are going to be spending a lot of time in a room working on it, why not have some form of entertainment? ;)  Honestly, the projector has come in handy when it comes to playing Dead Space 2.  It helps being able to see all the aliens in giant form. I still have to ask John to slay aliens for me on occasion.  :)

Putting the drywall up seemed to be no problem, but then came the taping and the mudding. In late May John worked on taping and mudding for six days straight. Six days = lots of tape and a coat and a half of mud.  I think the whole process was taking longer than we both anticipated.  He ended up taking a break for a while from the basement.  We checked out carpet, debated on what to do for the bathroom downstairs, but no mudding.  I finally  begged for John to get me supplies was recruited to help. John bought me my own set of supplies and I was really excited about learning how to mud.

For the record... I tried, I really did.  During the four evenings that I helped John with mudding- I'm not sure if I got more on myself, the floor, or on the wall.

Yeah...I was pretty much coated in mud.

I got mud everywhere.  "Oopsie", "Oh crap",and "Whew!" were frequently said as I attempted to mud the walls and ceiling.

Thursday evening I was all gung ho about finishing the basement. We were so close! Half the basement needed the final coat of mud.  I got home from work and began working on the basement. It was a very bad night for me to do any scraping.  No matter how hard I tried, something always went wrong when I went to scrape the mud. I got lines in it, random pieces of grass got in it, I botched corners,it just looked weird, etc.   I ended up coating the wall with mud (which I could handle) and John scraped for me. It was perfect :)

John finished mudding Friday night (HOORAY!). It seems there is a light at the end of the tunnel now.  Today, he spent the afternoon sanding walls.  I "helped" by scraping globs spots of dried mud off the floor.  There were a lot of spots :(

Hopefully this monster of a basement project will be done soon. This experience has taught me a lot... like don't quit my day job because I stink at mudding :)