This morning, the Danvers building inspector stopped by and gave us the seal (or signature, rather) of approval!

The assessor stopped by shortly thereafter, which means that our tax bill will be going up (not so good) but also that our house will officially be more valuable (good for when we sell it).

So now we can officially move in! Hopefully we’ll work on that this Saturday. Other than that, there are a few minor things to touch up, like adding some handles to the doors and putting a top piece on the half wall, but that won’t stop us from moving things in!

We’ve come a long way since we started working on the basement. To show just how far, here’s a pic from before:

And here’s after:

See more before pics and after pics.

Into the living room

And there was light! And, more importantly, electricity. Yes, our electrician came back today to do his finish electrical work in the basement. He has a few small things to finish up tomorrow, but for the most part everything electrical is finished. We’ve got six recessed lights in the living room, wrap lights in the laundry area and storage room, and working receptacles and switches all over the place. He also took care of a few non-basement items upstairs, like installing a new light in the ceiling above the kitchen sink, installing a larger GFCI receptacle in the bathroom, and fixing/updating a receptacle in the kitchen that wasn’t grounded properly (!).

Having electricity and working lights downstairs really goes a long way to making the basement look almost finished. The bright lighting also helps to point out all of the little imperfections in our painting and drywalling, most of which we’ll probably let slide, but some of which we’ll want to fix. More importantly, it will make it much easier to get our work finished, since we won’t have to rely solely on the one portable work light we had been using.

Earlier this week, I worked on getting the French doors painted. We have a bit of clean-up work to do on that, removing the remaining bits of plastic sheet covering the glass, and scraping off the paint that managed to get through and around the plastic. I also got things all cleaned up and rearranged the storage room so that the electrician could have access to the electrical panel. And I did a bit of touch up gooping and painting on a few other areas around the basement.

What’s left? We still need to do a bit more touch-up gooping and painting, lay down the flooring, install the baseboard moulding around the living room and laundry area, install the casing around the French doors and the door to outside, raise the cabinets over the washer/dryer, install a door in front of the washer/dryer, install latches and handles on the French doors, and get the final electrical and building inspections. After that, we can move in! We still have a way to go, but it feels so close!

Here are some photos I took tonight, showing what it looks like with most of the painting done and the lights on!