One time I renovated my parents’ basement

In 2008 I graduated from the Gallatin School at NYU with a degree in Individualized Study. I didn’t do a great job defining a “concentration” of mine, I took a hodgepodge of curious classes: Video Art Studio, a class on the history of childhood in western culture, and of course a Marx reading class.

Armed with this bachelor’s degree, the obvious next step for me professionally was to renovate my parent’s basement.

Here, you can see the basement I grew up with: cinder block walls, concrete floors, and florescent lighting.

Full disclosure: I did not participate in the Pepsi Challenge

I’m not sure exactly how I planned this large renovation project, but I did take a good amount of inspiration from this Housebuilding book.

We submitted all our plans to our local township’s building regulatory body. The person in charge was surprised we even submitted plans since I guess folks just tear up their houses and do a bunch of renovation work without oversight. Something something the American DIY spirit.

One of the township regulations required a secondary fire escape path, so we cut one out. After digging the biggest hole of my life, I tore through ten inches of cinder block with an intensely large wet saw.

The walls were coated with a waterproofing paint, and then I framed out the room with 2x4s.

My dad hidden behind a pole, and the Pinball game from the 1950s

I wired up the room with electrical outlets, as well as cable to new recessed lighting.

I’m not sure I would feel comfortable doing this sort of work on my own now

The whole room was insulated:

And then sheetrock installed:

Installing sheetrock on the ceiling requires risers (the yellow piece of equipment pictured here) to elevate the piece while you’re drilling it into the ceiling joists

Applying spackle to smooth over the cracks between slabs of sheetrock is a very important step.

When I look back at this, I can’t believe I did it. Not “wow I can’t believe I did such a great job.” More like “wow I can’t believe I was so headstrong to take on this intense task.” I made a lot of wild choices. The sheetrock slabs had to fit into awkward spaces, and I would be measuring and making rhombus shape cuts, and praying that things would fit together. I guess they did?

Nowadays I would never take on such an ambitious project. I rarely come up with wild ideas for websites (I’m a software engineer now) and try to execute them. I have before, and will often get upset with myself that I can’t create exactly what I wanted.

If I want to create, I take a formal course before taking even a medium-sized project. I’ll experiment with tools and build little projects that teach me about how the tools work for my own education. If an interesting, accomplishable project becomes visible I might make it, but if I can’t see the way there I probably won’t.

But anyway here’s the basement today. My mom uses it as a sewing studio. Sometimes she puts on episodes of Lost in the background while she works on a new quilt.