We’ve got a one-level pillbox ranch house, so any dreams I had about lovely Newell posts, grand staircases, and whatever else are pretty much out. However! I do have one set to put my mark on, and that’s the stairs going into the basement.

even Saffron is a little creeped out standing on them

Up until very recently, I mostly tried to ignore them. They were rickety things, covered in the same shit-colored carpeting as the rest of the house, and always a little too shallow for my comfort. It was honestly an area of the house that I tried to ignore as much as possible. Vacuuming them never made them look any better/cleaner. They always gave just a little too much whenever you’d walk down them, too, and whenever I’d be carrying laundry down, I’d try to push the story about how Kevin’s mother fell through one of the steps out of my head. I had to work even harder at not thinking about them when Kevin took a good look at the underbelly of the staircase and found that the treads were basically just flimsy boards held in place with nails on either side, and no supporting brackets or boards or whatever you’re supposed to use to keep your stairs from cracking under the pressure of anything that weighs more than a hot dog.

Sigh.

I was at clinicals (the nursing school kind) a few weeks ago, and Kevin sent me a blurry cameraphone shot of something indiscernible, although I thought it looked like carpeting. It was basically a crappy version of this picture:

Gross. And now, we’ve got this:

The improvement is obvious, although the amount that the stairs give when you’re walking down them is ALSO quite obvious now. And scary. Eventually, these stairs will be replaced with sturdy ones that we’ll never have to worry about falling through. Yay! As for design, Anna over at Door Sixteen has done a couple of posts (1, 2) on staircases from which I’m going to draw heavy inspiration. I’ll have to keep my eye on Ferm Living for the next time they’re having a wallpaper sale. Oooh, or Minimoderns (yum).

Just starting to frame up the walls

In order to install the shower stall we chose, he’s going to have to move the floor drain a little, which entailed busting up a square of foundation that hasn’t been touched in about 60 years. First, he tried using some sort of diamond-edged saw blade. Then he tried using a hammer and chisel. THEN, he Hulked out and just hammered away at the concrete like John Henry and that’s what did the job. Look at that virgin soil! I should snag some for the garden this year.

the results of a little John Henry action

I can’t wait until the basement is done and we can get to work getting Galaga and Space Invaders cleaned up and up and running again.

walls mostly framed

Can I tell you how happy I’ll be to get a rebate check from our electric utility for all the insulation we’re buying up for the basement?

walls framed, outer-wall insulation up, starting on the drywall

Hey, guess what! It’s hard to take pictures inside a tiny room. It’s turning into a legitimate bathroom, though! Yay!

DRYWALL!

This is probably what we’ll end up doing in the room. Somewhat boring tile floors that are readily available at the hardware store here in town, with grey or black grout (we learned our lesson with bright white grout in the upstairs bath, that no matter how clean it is, it shows EVERY FLAW and EVERY SPECK OF EVERYTHING, cripes), shallow pedestal and toilet, corner shower stall, and white walls. We’re going simple on the lighting fixture, and there will be a little nook alongside the shower where I want to hang bare pine board shelving for towels and toilet paper. We’ll also need a hook for the hand towel (I love this octopus one), and I’d like to go with a wooden bathmat to carry over the shelving theme. Cute, but a little boring.

If I had my choice, I’d go with a nice punch of color on the floor, like these vivid Mexican cement tiles in a bold graphical pattern. Sigh. Kevin will veto, I’m sure of it.

Also, I’d like to do a large, interestingly-framed mirror that’ll run the length of the space behind the sink and toilet, so I’d better start junk shopping for one. Brand new will be outrageous.

When we moved in, we were so overwhelmed by projects in areas of the house that we use everyday, as well as how stinking awful that room was, that we basically shut the door to this bathroom and never used the room (except in extreme poop emergencies, since there’s only one other bathroom in the house). It was really easy to forget that the room was even there. It was a sort of time capsule, illustrating the overall effect of the state of the house when we took it over.

Welllll, Kevin got a wild hair up his ass last night and decided to tear it down, as a way of busting into our giant “To Do” list that we’re going to be covering over the next year or so. The list has been looming largely since we received funding to do some major renovations around the holidays, and it’s been difficult to decide where to start. Not anymore!

I think it’s time for a pretty major hardware store run, don’t you?

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?

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.

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.

Today Kevin and his dad spent most of the day running loads of trash to the dump, which really made a dent in the amount of stuff lying around inside and outside the house waiting to go. The end of moving his dad’s stuff out of the house is finally in sight, which means that we’ll be able to make great strides in getting the house into move-in condition. They’re finishing out the day by clearing out half the garage (previously filled almost to the ceiling with miscellaneous junk, non-running lawn equipment, and empty cardboard boxes) so that Kevin can move the 1953 Chevy there before they salt the roads for the winter, which could have done heavy damage to the car. Thank goodness we were able to get it over there in time!

I spent the day working in the basement some more. We brought the Shop Vac over, and I spent a good bit of time vacuuming cobwebs out of the space between the floorboards from upstairs and where the old drop ceiling had been before we tore it out. It’s hard looking up and holding the vacuum wand up for hours! I felt kinda bad for the spiders to be destroying their habitat, but I figure everything in nature needs to reboot every once in a while. It’s good for the earth to be scorched every so often. Also, let me tell you how much I love our Shop Vac: A LOT. It is amazing and magical and is made of unicorns and rainbows. I honestly don’t know what we would do without it. Probably have kitty litter tracked all over the house, that’s what.

I also spent a lot of time making the only usable bathroom in the house usable again. I bought some turbo Tilex for mildew and mold, hosed the place down, and scrubbed it with one of those heavy-duty Scotch Brite scrubbers with the plastic handles. You won’t believe it’s the same place, except for the floor. I think we’re going to tear out the shower, get a new sink and toilet, and tile the floor to make it nicer. All in good time.

I also spent some time with my new best friend, the scraper with the curved end, just right for bumping with my other hand to jab into some stubborn paint flakes. I honestly wish there were an easier way of scraping all of that paint off the basement walls, but I’m not sure there is. I should do some research. Kevin just wants me to scrape the paint that’s obviously flaking, and then we’ll paint over the rest. However, whatever paint was used down there in the past wasn’t right for painting concrete blocks, so it’s ALL going to flake eventually. I’d rather scrape it all, use the right paint, and never have to worry about it again than just paint over it and wait for the rest of it to flake off eventually. Maybe that’s just me, though.

See you tomorrow!

ETA: Oh yeah, the blood! Evidently, there were some junk boards with nails still in them in the back of the pickup truck during one of the dump runs, and as his dad walked to grab them, he stepped on a nail. Yikes! He seems to be okay, though. We’re going to make sure his tetanus shot is up to date.

We also came to the house to discover that the dumpster is totally full already, and we haven’t gotten to the garage, the attic, or gutted the bathroom yet. We’re trying to figure out if we need another full dumpster, or if we might be able to borrow a big truck and just make a dozen trips to the dump on our own, which would be cheaper.

Anyway, on to the pictures:

The illegal bedrooms are gone!

Now you can totally see the buckling wall

The room is so huge now that it's (mostly) empty

The gross bathroom has been gutted except for the plumbing

We brought all of the items that Kevin decided to keep upstairs, piled the trash in the middle of the room, and hosed the walls down with bleach. We’re on our way to a non-stinky house!