Thank you all, for your continued kind words. Campanula, yes, exactly. Setting the garden (and home) within the larger context is always the tricky thing, right? Like, on one hand you want to have your way over the landscape, to tame it and mold it into more of what you like. But on the other hand, the cues really need to come from what's already around you otherwise it's either going to be a ton or work to fight nature, and/or it won't even look right when you're done. So the rock theme really plays well here. GreenHearted, that's a great question. I have done the foundation differently on different stone projects here. I'm not an expert on this, but none of my walls have fallen down yet! (With the older ones being over 10 years old.) You are quite right, a dry-stacked wall is an inherently flexible structure and is very forgiving of expansion and contraction of the ground. On this wall, I dug/scraped down to the subsoil layer, which is a very compacted, concrete-like substance. I didn't put down gravel or anything, mostly because the very idea of that pushed the project into the realm of unrealistic for my diy self. Stonework does have a tendency to slowly sink into the ground. Rocks that used to be standing above grade are now below the level of the grass. I'm not sure how much a gravel foundation would help that. One of my walls has a gravel foundation and it hasn't behaved any differently than the others as far as I can tell. Not sure if that answer helps or not! :)

meganmm, Thank you, we are enjoying it. I see I listed the name of the granite incorrectly in the above post. We have Madura gold in our master bath, the basement bath is kashmir gold. Let me give you some background on the countertop. Lowes had advertised last summer, in the Sunday supplement, a 48" pre fab granite top in Desert Gold for something like $269. In a little section to the side it said also available in Kashmir Gold, Black Absolute and Blue Pearl. Kashmir gold was close to what I was considering in "real" granite, so I went in to order it. No luck. The salesperson couldn't find a sku for it. After several days and plenty of phone calls, it became apparent that it was a misprint. After talking with the manager he agreed to sell me one for the advertised price, but it should have been closer to $600! So I got a really good deal on that. The tile is travertine and was a special order from Home Depot. The floor tiles were 18x18 and we cut them to do the hopscotch pattern. The wall tiles in the shower are 12x12 below the insert and the same tiles cut into 6x12 subways above. The insert itself is a 12x12 sheet of kashmir gold mosaic with a travertine pencil liner. We purchased all of the tile during a 20% off sale on special order tile at HD. Good luck with your project. Feel free to email me if you have anymore questions, since now that I have gone back to work I don't check in here very often.

I would love a separate Homeschool space, however we don't have room unless we give-up our basement playroom, and I can't do that! And I do like that this Homeschool space is versitle and could become a breakfast nook or second seating area once the kids are done school. We did consider a complete teardown down and rebuild, but our home is still in good shape other then the kitchen. We just need some more open loving space. I love the hidden pantry in layout 3! Any idea how to make the kitchen a touch smaller? Maybe moving the fridge as range to the same wall? And do you think the dishwasher is too far away from the dining room table?

Please share your thoughts and rate our basement renovation project completed in 2022!