Category — Basement

The problem with having such a long list of things that need to be done (or purchased) is that it’s difficult to know where to start. Well, we KNOW where to start: the basement walls. They’re cracked and bowing, and they need to be addressed first. We’re going to be installing wall anchors to pull the walls straight from the outside, and that’ll probably be done first thing after the ground thaws out and dries out this spring. It’ll be a pretty big, expensive project, although hopefully it’ll be taken care of within a few days’ time.

The problem, then, is figuring out what to tackle first after the walls are completed. Here are a few prospects:

• Tearing up every square millimeter of carpeting in the house and installing hardwood flooring ourselves
• Tearing out and rebuilding the basement bathroom
• Tearing out and replacing the stairs leading down to the basement, and walling-off the stairs and putting a door at the bottom of them so that it’s a separate space that isn’t open to the upstairs
• New couch
• The Kitchen of Doom

I’m going to follow this up with a series of posts filled with ideas that I have for these projects.
Where would you start?

So, our house was built in 1956 and really soon afterwards, a kitchen was added on where the back door used to be. The basement is sort of walk-out, so the kitchen is way higher than ground level out back, so they stuck a little cement-block room underneath it with a cement floor. It’s mostly used for storage, and we’ll be putting shelves in there to use it as a root cellar for storing canned foods.

Anyway, last night Kevin was organizing bikes in there (he and his family are crazy bike people, have I mentioned that before?), and he noticed that the room was set up in a weird way. The floor to it is a full foot higher than the floor to the rest of the basement, and it was poured by somebody who didn’t know what they were doing. Instead of just floating the cement inside the block walls, they built a form on top of something else and poured it on top.

So, there’s a step to go up into the room, and I made Kevin pry up one of the boards. We found a layer of plastic sheeting under the cement floor.

Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of Law & Order: SVU/Criminal Intent. Okay, I definitely know that I’ve watched too many episodes of them. And maybe it didn’t help that we had just watched Stir of Echoes the night before. But our first reaction was, “OMG, there’s a body under there!” If you look at the picture, along the far wall you can see how far up the floor was built above the ground, too. The bottom of the concrete slab isn’t even flush with the bottoms of the concrete blocks that make up the walls.

There’s also the fact that Kevin’s brother is convinced that we’ve got a ghost because the cats (and his old cat, from when he lived here as a kid/teenager) would often freak out in the basement for no good reason and tear through the house. I’ve witnessed this behavior. IT HAPPENS.

I suppose that another option is that somebody buried some treasure under there, but honestly? I’m wondering if we should call in one of those cadaver-sniffing dogs.

Kevin and I have been slowly working on getting the house squared away. He’s mostly been concentrating on getting the basement in order and the pool table put together, and I’ve mostly been working on keeping the dishes clean and the making the most of the living room. After moving our IKEA Expedit bookcase out of the way of the front door and into the actual sitting area, we decided that its placement just didn’t work but weren’t ready to decide where to move it, which meant I was not busying myself figuring out what would be going on all the shelves. Last night, we finally got it moved to where I think it is going to stay, which is in the middle of the large expanse of wall at the far end of the living room. Now, I can get busy putting things away!

We spent some time shopping over the weekend, and got some items for the house, so I’m going to call that productive. One of the things we picked up was a table and chairs for the kitchen.

The table is perfect because it’s large when you use the leaves, but they can both be lowered to take up less room when it’s not in use. This is perfect for the little nook in the kitchen under the glass-doored shelves. The chairs are kinda gross, but we’re going to de-grease them and use them until some time in the future when we’ll recover them with something cuter.

At the same time, I picked up a lovely little Zenith bakelite clock radio for $15. I love it.

Kevin has done some fabulous work in the basement. I’m really amazed at how wonderful it looks.

Compare those photos to this and this, which are basically taken from the same angles when we were working on cleaning it out.