Finishing a Basement: A 6 year struggle

I am so excited to share these next few posts with you guys!  It's mostly going to be updates on the work going on in our downstairs.

 Probably not too exciting for you, I guess, but I'm a sucker for before/after pictures.  Maybe I'm not alone on that? Pinterest tells me that there's a whole slew of people just like me so I'm just going to imagine that we are cyber BFF's and you love them too, mkay?

We have been slowly working on finishing our lower level living space (it's really a walk-out basement but I thought I'd make it sound fancy.  It worked, right?).  This progress is really something that has spanned out a total of 6 years people!! So when I say "slowly", I really mean it.

This last year we've had the proverbial "fire under our rears" so to speak because we are...

Drum roll please!

MOVING!!

We've had our eye on moving back to our small northern MN hometown for a while and, fortunately for us, the company that my husband works for has a branch office located there.  Well, one
thing let to another and turns out the need someone in his field at that particular office.  YAY us!! We'll be listing the house come April or May and hopefully be moved there by the end of summer. 

With the idea of moving, we had to make our house more competitive and that definitely meant adding another bedroom, bathroom and another 1,200 sf of living space.  

When we first purchased our home in 2008 our basement looked like this:

 Main area where a bedroom and family room would go

 roughed in bathroom

Part of roughed in bathroom and a small view of laundry room

The one random bedroom downstairs that Mr. Serene had taken over.

We had some major ideas, but none of which we could afford.

Enter, my father-in-law.  He's super handy and was pretty pumped to help turn our basement into an actual living space. The only problem is that he lives 3 hours away and can only work for about 3 days at a time on it and only about once every 1 1/2 months or so.  We've been making it work for us though.
We also decided to hire out a few things like our venting and our entire bathroom.

There are just some things that I'd rather leave to the pros, you know?

We were pretty fortunate to have amazing neighbors, one of which just happened to be an electrician, and they came over and did all of our electrical work for us!! Yay! They were so patient with us too; teaching us all of their insight! (On a side note, they moved :( and I desperately would like to have them back.  BEST NEIGHBORS EVER!!)

This is just a sneak peak into some of the progress we have been making.  We are A LOT farther along than this but I figured I would just tease you for now :) Stay tuned for the finished product!