Basement finishing touches

We're back at work on the house after a very restful week in Costa Rica.  Nice to trade chop/tile/table saws for sand and surf for a bit!  But now we're ready to wrap up some big projects here.  First up, we've finished up the trim work and paint in the basement so it's ready for carpet install next weekend.  I'm happiest with the stairwell - an odd thing to pay attention to, I know - because it took so much time and turned out (in my totally biased opinion) very nicely.  Next time around and a little DIY advice - if you're fully enclosing a partially open staircase, just rip out all the walls and install new drywall. Since we didn't do that and instead kept the old drywall up top, we then had to try to match up the framing and drywall on the bottom.  We got remarkably close but it wasn't quite perfect so we added a band board to hide the difference.  I'm actually quite happy with the way it looks now because the band board breaks up the otherwise long wall so aesthetically, we probably would have wanted to do something similar anyway.  Nevertheless, it would have been nice to have the trim work be optional instead of mandatory.  We also got a little creative with the stairs, ripping the top of the baseboard to trim out the top of the skirtboard.  I think (and hope) that when the carpet goes in, it'll be impossible to tell that these were ever basic, open basement stairs.  I guess we'll find out next week - carpet install is Saturday so we'll have plenty of "after" pictures to share once the basement is finished!

Stairwell, waiting for carpet

And one from above - a better angle to see the band board and skirtboard

More detail on the trim

The first of a few shots of the basement, with trim installed and painted throughout