Seven Ten Clark

Yesterday when Kevin went to the house over his lunch break, he got one of the best surprises EVER: his brother Kris had been over there all morning, finishing up the basement and doing a good chunk of the demolition that needed to take place to finish gutting the room. It was like an early Christmas present! Except that demo also showed us that all four walls of the basement are buckling. Sad face. We’re going to have to explore that whole basement wall anchor concept, and hopefully we can find an option that won’t be terribly expensive, or that we can do ourselves.

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!

For the second night in a row, we worked on going through all of the boxes and dressers and piles of stuff in the basement. It was hard work, but we’re probably about 90% done with that part, and we think that demolition should be pretty easy work. Who doesn’t like breaking stuff?

The laundry room is a nice minty green.

The root cellar. Gotta love all that mold.

You can see where the wall is buckling here.

That's going to be our entertainment center after we get it cleaned up.

Now that most of the stuff is out of this area of the house, the dumpster is almost full! We hadn’t planned on that, but we’ve still got to put all of the demolished building materials in there from the gutting of the room, as well as the materials from when we gut the bathroom, into it. Also, the garage hasn’t even been touched yet, so we’re looking at having to get another dumpster. Tonight, the basement will be bleached after all of the demo is done, so hopefully that’ll start the long process of getting the stink out of the house. That, getting the carpets and air ducts professionally cleaned, and scrubbing and painting all of the rooms will hopefully start to make this house feel like a home.