The last demolition (for now)

Once upon a time (about three years ago), we lived in the basement of the house while the first and second floors were being remodeled/rebuilt.  When we bought the house, it had three finished rooms and a full bathroom that were...serviceable.  That is, we could live in the rooms and we could use the bathroom but neither the layout, the insulation, nor the finishes were what we wanted so we knew we would rip it all out and start over.  And over the fall, that's what we did!  It's nearly complete now so we'll have "after" pictures to post soon (assuming I manage to post them) but for now, here are some from the earlier days when we were tearing it all apart.

Hard to believe but this used to be a living area (with a fireplace!)

View from the other side - we used plastic to seal up the stairwell to the first floor

And on the far side of the long room - we put in an egress window where an exterior door used to be so that this can be a safe and legal bedroom when finished

The construction is a little odd in that the there's a brick/block wall between the main basement and this side part - this used to be two rooms, one of which served as our temporary bedroom for a time.  Now that it's all opened up, it will become a long theatre room (once we move all this stuff out!)

It took a full dumpster to demo and clean out the entire basement!  I didn't think we would fill this up but...we definitely did

Once we had some (temporary) space, this turned into a cut room for a bit

But then we started framing and doing rough-in plumbing for the new bathroom and bar space

 More - much more - on the basement to come.  We hired out much of the basement work so this turned out to be one of the faster projects and should be done in another week or so - stay tuned!