you know what this did for our property value? absolutely nothing. in fact, i think it went down again.

so several weeks ago we got a lot of rain. on several occasions when we have gotten a lot of rain, our basement has leaked a bit. this time around, it was more then a bit.
lucky for us, we waited over 12 hours at the auto show carpet sale several months back and bought new carpet for the basement. even luckier for us, we hadn't put it in yet.
with talan's 2nd birthday in just about a month, dave decided it would be a good thing to take this project on NOW instead of waiting until after the party. i had my doubts, but dave ended up coming through with just 5 days to spare!
first dave ripped out the old stinky carpet and then started tearing drywall out. the basement then sat that way for about 2 or 3 weeks. that's what made me a bit nervous!
dave spent about 2 days running water against our house making sure he knew exactly where the leak was coming from before he could do anything else. after he saw that there were no other leaking surprises we went out and bought probably 60 bags of dirt to build up the landscaping on the side of the house where it was leaking. of course this is michigan so the bags of dirt were frozen. and let me tell you, breaking up frozen dirt is next to impossible.
so we spent about 2 or 3 days working on the landscaping issue and then dave was able to move back inside and start working on ripping out the tiny bit of carpet that was UNDER the floor stud. he then cleaned the moldy areas on the wall, fixed the crack, and put the drywall back up.
it took the two of us just a couple of hours for 2 nites to paint the walls and then dave cleaned up the floors so they would be ready for the carpet.
on saturday, a co-worker of dave's came over to help us lay the carpet down. that went relatively quickly and easily (for all i know...i was upstairs!) and after he left, dave put the molding up.
we then spent ALL day sunday moving the furniture back in and organizing everything. last nite dave hung a few things and now the basement is more or less done. we have a few more decorating things to do, but at least it's ready for the big party on thursday! of course we'll probably have to rearrange a few things for the party, but at least we know what it will be like after thursday.
we are IN LOVE with the basement now. the new carpet made such a HUGE difference to the room and we feel like we can really spend a lot more living time down here and be really comfortable.
the boys, especially talan, were SO HAPPY to get their basement back! talan spent about an hour just running and jumping around the wide open area on sunday before we started moving things back in.
here are some pictures of the process.

right after most of the carpet was taken out:

taking the last bit of stinky, wet carpet out:
drywall down and the leak is exposed:
drywall finally going back up:

drywalled, painted, cleaned and ready for the carpet:

finally time to lay the carpet:

putting the molding up:



a few more things to do...but for the most part, it's done. i took these before talan came down and destroyed the place this morning!: