Slatty

Now that it is spring, we can turn our attention to the outside of our house, specifically the original wrought iron railings at our front and side entrances. If you look closely you can see the heart shapes in the metal. Yuck.  After falling in love with some inspiration (below) found on Apartment Therapy, we decided that we could tackle this project.

 

Inspiration at Apartment Therapy

First, we decided it would be best to paint the cement so we wouldn't see it as much through the slats.  The first color, this flesh type tone, turned out to be terrible, so we went back and had them tint it a darker brown. (You'll see it darker in a couple of the photos below.) Then Matt went to work building the structure for the railings. This task involved drilling 4 inch deep holes in solid concrete, not a fun job but Matt got to buy a hammer drill so that made him happy.



I worked on sanding and staining the cedar slats.  There were way too many to count.

After they dried, Matt started putting them up. Here is some of his work in progress.

After a few more slats and some trim, we were done. A relatively quick and easy project.

Basement Insulation

Since it is winter, we are relegated to indoor projects that don't involve busting through exterior walls or windows, which lead us to the least sexy of our projects, insulating our basement.  Since buying the house, we had always planned on eventually finishing the basement, but the project timeline got bumped up because of a limited term incentive program the City's energy efficiency office that helped us to increase our energy savings by about 20%.  To start, we had a blower door test done by a Home Performance with EnergyStar auditor who determined that the best bang for our buck would be to insulate the basement and airseal the rimjoist.She also suggested replacing the water heater because it wasn't properly vented. Luckily we were starting with a blank slate with no demo needed.

The plan was to adhere 1" XPS foam insulation to the basement walls and tape the seams to provide an air and moisture barrier then frame, insulate, install electrical, and drywall. The first challenge was getting all of the materials home in our little car and into the basement. As you can see the basement quickly became a disaster zone

 Slowly but surely, we worked our way around the basement insulating and framing.

 Then came the drywall, our arch enemy. In theory drywall should be simple. Measure, make a cut or two, screw in place. Somehow between cutting and screwing in place things get messed up by an 1/8 of an inch and I end up cutting again. Despite this challenge and the copious amounts of drywall dust that it generates, after a couple of weeks our basement looks like this.

Like I said, not sexy, but the room is noticeably warmer and  it brings us one step closer to having a truly finished basement.