New Bedroom in the Basement Apartment

Most of our spare time this spring and summer has been spent trying to build a new master bedroom for the basement apartment. My dad starting sorting and moving stuff that occupied the space back in January. Jill and I started to really get involved around March and April. Then it consumed just about every Saturday and many, many weeknights. We encouraged my dad quite a bit during the sorting process and I was actually quite surprised how much stuff left the house, both donated to DI and the dump. Most of the stuff that was in the basement has been there (undisturbed) since they moved into this house over ten years ago. We hauled off several furniture items, lots of books, and the even the old IronRite ironer machine (It is the big, white thing under the TV in the first picture). It is probably a collectible (Ebay has a few for $50 to $250) but it was just too big and it was decided to finally let it go. Just for fun, you can see a video of the Ironrite in action. Many more items were moved to the garage for a future garage/yard sale including many old computers and monitors. My dad and I are not fast workers by any stretch of the imagination. We also do not do this stuff very often, so you have to add a few hours here and there as we try to figure out our next steps. There were multiple times where I ended up just being the moral support as I waited and watched as he did the figuring or working on a single person task. It has been a lot fun working with my dad. My dad has a reputation of being very frugal and a pack rat. Fortunately and unfortunately a large majority of the room was built with stuff he already had. Fortunate because it saved a lot of money, unfortunate because it validated his pack rat piles. Sorry mom! With the exception of the closet space, the new room ended up slightly larger than my parent's master bedroom upstairs! We thought that the room would suddenly feel much smaller once the king size bedroom set was in but amazingly there is still ample room around the bed. The new hallway linen/vacuum closet is a great addition. We can finally move the vacuums out of the walkway in the kitchen space. Maya is very excited about her new room. She wasted no time decorating the room herself and did a great job. Everything is now decorated in pink with flowers and butterflies on the walls. She is loving the queen size bed (instead of the couch) and has been doing much better at settling down, falling asleep, and staying asleep through out the night. She really did not like sleeping on the couch (and so close to the outside door). As always, you can find more pictures of the basement room construction on my SmugMug site.