Basement renos

s promised, I'm going to share with you guys my basement reno. I've been trying to take photos every day so that you can see the progress. Actually the contractors are supposed to finish tomorrow, but my house is still a mess. I can't wait until everything is finished! We officially started our renos on April 30 and they were slated to finish on May 23, but it looks like they will finish early :-)

Day before renovation (April 29):

Doorway into our basement.

You can see the exposed stairs leading up to our 2nd floor in the basement

The stairway leading to the unfinished basement.

The basement stairway leading up to our main floor.

This is our unfinished basement.

Another view.

The door on the far end is our cold room.

My husband wanted to make the space under the stairs a storage space.

This is our cold room.

You can see the hold on the top right that brings cold air into the cold room. My husband wanted
the contractors to seal that and make this into another storage room. We plan on putting a freezer
in here.

Day 1 of renovation (April 30):

We wanted to put sub floors down before the laminate so most of day 1 was laying down the sub floor
over the concrete. That was a big chunk of our basement reno budget, but totally worth it.

And so it begins…

Look how messy it is!

The cold room door was taken down to put the sub floor down.

Our contractor brought samples of all the finishes that we get to choose from and laid it all in our
dining room for us to choose. As you can see, my house is a disaster area. We had to move all of our
small stuff upstairs and the big furniture we covered in plastic.

We are putting a bathroom in the basement and this is the floor we chose. It's a 12" x 24" white, porcelain
tile with a textured finish.

Here are the other samples.

We had a choice between 24" x 24" tiles and 12" x 24" tiles and I opted for the latter because I hate
the look of totally square tiles on the floor.

For the vanity countertop in the washroom I chose a white marble with subtle gray striations. It's
hard to see the striations in this photo.

Some of the other colours that he had. 

I chose this door style for the vanity door (shown in white) and for the actual colour I chose this dark
chocoate brown.

Close up of the vanity door colour.

For the shower tile I chose this white wall tile with a glazed stripe finish in 4" x 16" size. I love the look
of white subway tiles and this was something that I was interested in. I made sure the contractor
knew to install the tile horizontally instead of vertically.

For the stairs leading to the downstairs I opted for a white finish. Our main floor has oak floors and
I wanted the stairs to be white so that there would be a transition into a different floor colour for the
basement.

The middle tile (gray with dots) are our shower floor tiles. They are 2" x 2". 

Our contractor recommended we go for 2" x 2" instead of 1" x 1" which it also came in. He said
it would look better.

This is our basement laminate floor. It's a grayish colour and I love it!

We were debating between this gray and a white (seen below the gray one).

Here is the white floor. It would match the stairs, but it didn't pop enough against the wall colours
that we chose so we opted for the gray colour.

We got to choose all Benjamin Moore paint colours. Woohoo!

I chose Smoky Green CC-700 for our guest bedroom. It's a very popular colour amongst designers because
it tends to look like a Robin's Egg colour in certain lighting.

Stonington Gray HC-170 is also another favourite amongst designers. It's a neutral gray that doesn't
tinge blue or beige. Just a perfect neutral gray. I find gray is such a great colour on walls because it
really makes the baseboards pop and it's a great neutral colour that matches everything.

I chose Calm OC-22 for the bathroom colour. It complemented all the colours I chose for the washroom.

We are also adding an office in the basement for my husband and I chose Balboa Mist OC-27. It's a warm
gray, almost beige. I chose that colour because that room will not have pot lights like in the
main living area so I wanted to go lighter than the Stonington Gray colour. The office and the guest
bedroom will have a ceiling light fixture so it won't be as bright.

That is all for day 1 of the renos.