Basement Stairs and Another Wall Insulated

Saturday I worked hard to get another wall in my basement insulated. The trick with this wall, the basement stairs were right against the wall. I thought about this for about two weeks and then made my plan. Everything went just as planned--for once! This project had a massive potential for making big problems at my house. Without the stairs, we can't do laundry. If my wife misses one day without putting in laundry, the basement gets filled up!

To begin, I removed the steps. I used a circular saw to cut each stair down the middle. I then took my hammer and hit each part out of the dado created for each step. There were about five huge nails in each side of the stringers holding each step. Total over kill. I then took off one stringer and slide it out of my way. I cleaned and then painted the wall with a basement waterproofing paint. The wall was in good shape which meant I only had to fill in a few cracks with mortar.

Under our stairs there was a makeshift shelving system. I've always hated it and planned to redo it someday. Someday was Saturday. Discovered the entire stair system was being held up by two 2x4s! We dodged another bullet there. I beefed up the supports under the stairs with 4x4s and a studded wall. The stud wall really gives the entire platform good support now.

The wall was again treated with insulated foam board. This was also put behind the shelves.

The last step was to measure and cut new steps. The new steps were 29 1/2" wide. After a little trouble, I got them all in. I added 2x4 supports under each step to give them more strength. The steps will be carpeted so I used regular 2x10s for the stairs. If we wanted, we could have installed oak stairs but that would have raised the cost, big time. Carpeted stairs are fine for our basement remodel.

Really amazing how much warmer our basement is with these improvements. There are no heat runs in the basement but it is just as warm as the rest of the house.

In one of the pictures below you see all the crap back on the shelving unit. I made the base for two shelves but reused the plywood from the old shelves. I needed to stop the project and needed a place to put all that crap. I will be finishing that shelving area with plywood shelves, a wood panel against the insulation and stud wall at the back and to make the shelves look thicker, false fronts for each shelf.

Bookshelves for my classroom

Last year I moved to a new grade and classroom. The classroom was an addition to my school. Very nice and new however without storage. I had tons of student books, teaching materials, books about teaching and then supplies. Last year I built a low shelf to his language arts books and reading center work. This year it was a shelf to cover my small reading books plus a shelf for my day to day teaching materials.
Love how they turned out. I didn't put a lot of effort into the joinery or the finish. I didn't have a lot of time to mess around with them.

Shelves for a friend

My friend Tina asked me to build her shelves for a small desk area in her kitchen. She wanted them to match some existing shelves on the other side of the kitchen. I was able to match some of the edge detail with a router bit.
Hanging the shelves was a bit of an ordeal. Her husband Jerry and I spent around two hours hanging them. We were using the product Zip which just screws into the wall. Each one can hold 50 pounds of weight. The first two shelves went in easily. The ones to the right were a bear. Not sure what the dry wall on that side was- maybe first generation dry wall. It wasn't thick enough and it was hard like a rock. The Zip product just spun then ate up the wall too much.
She loves her new shelves and I think they look like they have always been there.