Our Redneck Home Improvement or How I Spent My Christmas Break

I sit here late on New Year's Day and I am exhausted but it is the good kind of exhausted that comes from accomplishment.  DH and I got so much accomplished during the last 3 days it isn't even funny.

First off, a little background.  I haven't blogged in ages.  Prepping for Christmas, Alan off school and just the day to day challenges have left me with little time and no inspiration.  We had a good Christmas -- very simple -- and there were no meltdowns.  Historically, holidays are tough on the boyz and more than a few have been memorable in a bad way. 

But that isn't to say that Christmas was "incident-free".  We were sitting at dinner and we heard a loud crash from the basement.  When we went down there, we discovered that Alan had toppled the old kitchen table we had sitting down there.  Naturally there was a recently watered plan on top of it and all our hats and gloves from the recent snow were scattered all over and it was all a HUGE mess.  Yuck.  When DH looked closer (he is good about that!) he discovered that one of the wires for our internet was down and mostly stripped.  Sigh.

This is our basement last year. On the right is the  climbing platform that DH built for Alan a few years ago.

Alan was thrilled that Dad had put the climbing bars back up!

Our basement is unfinished.  With the rate that Alan wrecks things, that always seemed the best route.  DH had covered most major duct work, piping and wiring with plywood to limit Alan's access but somehow the little sneak kept finding new things to wreck.  With both of us being engineers, we are way too practical to finish our basement ceiling with drywall (this gives you no access to critical stuff) and a drop ceiling is completely impractical since Alan would dismantle that faster than we could install it!

It was Joe's birthday but we kept the kid busy!

Of course, he is a typical boy -- playing with power tools is fun!

DH had a great idea and said "Let's cover the whole ceiling with plywood.  We can still take down sheets if we need access but it will be more uniform and block Alan's access to all the critical stuff."  He proposed this on Friday.  On Saturday we sketched out the basement and figured out how much lumber and plywood we would need and I went out to the hardware store to place the order.  We had plans all day Sunday.  The lumber showed up late Monday morning and by Wednesday evening we had 3/4 of the basement ceiling covered. 

All this in less than a week! 

Mostly done.  I like it.  It reminds me a bit of a cabin in the woods -- but that paneling has GOT to go!

I can never complain about DH being one of "those" husbands -- the kind that starts a million project and never finishes one, or worse, the kind that only dreams but never does any kind of home improvements.  It may not be a fancy basement -- far from it!  But it is useable, practical and mostly complete!