Underneath it All, Part Deux.

Welcome to status report #1. So far, things are going well down there in the basement.

Don't let this photo make you think we're actually DOING the work.

The first thing the nice man did was to “demo” the old ceiling and the cement stuff on the walls. We had been worried that it would be really hard to remove that stuff, but apparently, when they hit the ceiling a few times, the whole thing came crashing down, which made us doubly glad that we decided to take it down, since it seems like it was about to take itself down on top of us. The first two days were astonishingly dusty, and an incredible amount of dust came up through the cracks around the edges of the first-floor rooms, so we were living in a mini-winter-wonderland for a little while there. The nice man actually hired someone to come over and help out with the dust on Friday and let me tell you, she was a miracle. I was doing a little cleaning up of my own in anticipation of a visit from my dear parents on Friday afternoon, and I decided to take a break for a bite to eat. One soft-boiled egg and a few chapters of Stieg Larsson later, I returned to find the living room dusted and vacuumed and the kitchen dusted and mopped – amazing!

I have actually had this actual dream.

I don’t think we’re really in a position to hire someone regularly, but I think that getting someone to clean your house professionally on the morning of the day your mother is coming to visit may be the greatest stress-reduction innovation of 2010, and I definitely plan to do this again in the future. Look how happy the family was in the clean living room!

Welcome home, Mom and Dad!

Anyway, back to the basement. After the ceiling and walls were stripped down to the cinderblocks, the nice man removed the paneling from the stairwell, moisture sealed the outside walls, and removed the vinyl tiles, and then began working on the windows. The first three are sort of in, but they have yet to be sealed into place.

Some of the fixtures for the canister lights have been placed, and the framing for the drywall has begun. The nice man also took on a side-project we hadn’t been expecting – replacing the back door. The old door was quite a sight- the glass had been broken, so it was boarded up with plywood, and the knob and locks no longer worked, so it was kept closed with a series of long screws going through the edge of the door into the frame. I’m guessing that part of the nice man’s rationale for replacing it was to save himself the hassle of unscrewing the door every time he wanted to load materials and scrap in and out of the basement, but whatever his reasoning, we are THRILLED with the new door.

That’s the first week – as far as I understand, this coming week will be a fiesta of electric work and drywalling and then the last week will be tiling and trimming. Which means that by the beginning of August we should be watching TV, holding band practices, and playing pinball in our subterranean paradise . . .

Underneath it All.

After a long period of inactivity, we have surged back into action by hiring a nice man to finish our basement. The only work this entails for us is going to our jobs and making money to pay him, and making hard decisions like what color tile is going to go on the floor. So far, we seem to be okay at it, and he seems to be great at his part of the deal. It’s supposed to be a three-week process, so this will be the first of multiple status reports, but before I begin, I think you should refresh your memory of the sorry state the basement was in when we moved in.

Mold, mold everywhere! So we ripped out all that carpet and paneling.

But then we were left with that weird cement-y overhang halfway up the wall, and the corresponding heavy cement-y ceiling with cracks over on the fireplace side of the basement. And there was that terrible vinyl tile on the floor – you know, that ugly love child of grey linoleum and pale green bathroom tile that bears an unholy resemblance to mummified pimiento-loaf?  I’ve had some variation of this tile in every home I’ve occupied in my adult life, usually tucked away in some corner, peeking out under the edge of the fridge, or hidden under an area rug in the horribly-but-aptly-named mudroom, and I am ready to bid it goodbye forever.

The plan for the new basement is this: terracotta-toned ceramic tile on the floor. Moisture locked and mold-resistant-drywalled walls and ceilings. 6 recessed lights to replace the 2 weird hanging fixtures. New, efficient windows to replace the old cracked ones. New outlets to replace the terrifying, waterlogged zombie outlets.

Check back to see how things are shaping up!

Surprise!

Our first year of residence in the House Brand House has been full of surprises. Like when I touched that mold in the basement and found out it was a decomposed mouse – Surprise! And that crazy metallic butterfly wallpaper in the bathroom – Surprise! And when that tree fell down and we had no heat for three days – Big Cold Surprise!

But the other day I had a very pleasant surprise. I was closing the downstairs windows as part of our “attack on all fronts haphazardly” strategy to deal with the crazy heat wave (if you also live along the Eastern seaboard and would like to try it, this strategy entails wandering about the house randomly opening and closing windows and blinds and turning fans on and off as your heat-addled brain sees fit).  One of our living room windows has always been a little sticky, so I sort of slammed it down, and when it hit the bottom of the casing, the bottom pane of the window fell in on me. Surprise!

I was sure I had broken the window and would now need to add a new window to the already extensive list of badly-needed house repairs. But then a memory buried deep inside my heat-drunk brain began inching to the surface. Hadn’t I seen something like this before? Maybe in an infomercial? An image slowly came into focus – an image of a Stepford wife holding a tipped-in window pane, washing the OUTSIDE of the window while standing INSIDE the house, her face frozen in a rictus of housecleaning ecstasy. Could it be that the previous owners of this house, those owners who were happy to live with fires in the closet and mold all around and non-working dishwashers, and ornamental doors glued on the walls, had actually invested in technologically advanced windows that opened in for cleaning? It was true. The window I was holding had little tabs that snapped into place when I tilted the bottom pane back up. I tried a couple of other windows, and they all do this – amazing!

Of course, realizing that I COULD clean the outsides of my windows didn’t necessarily inspire me to do so, but in this world of surprises, who knows – I may clean those windows yet!

The Apian Way.

I’ve read in the news that there’s some sort of worldwide bee crisis/epidemic/strike, but I’m here to tell you it sure doesn’t seem like that around here. You see, we have a little bee problem here in the house brand house. On warm days, there are swarms, and I mean SWARMS of the fuzzy little guys in the bushes by the front door and all along the front path. When it’s really hot, they sort of drunkenly stagger around, bumping into your knees and flying up your skirt, which is frankly not the kind of thrill I’m looking for.

When we first realized we had a problem, we decided to try to deal with it ourselves with some kind of anti-bee spray. Since most of the bees were concentrated around the area behind the left azalea and just to the right of the path, we figured we had two nests and could just pump them full of bee-killer spray and be done with the whole mess. But, being hippies, and also not wanting to spray the yard full of toxins and have the neighbors’ cats dropping dead on our lawn, we decided to first try the less-toxic, all-natural bee-kill spray. It contains some variety of mint oil, which is supposedly deadly for bees, but alas, it didn’t slow our little friends down for a minute. They burst from their nests the next morning, buzzing happily with minty-fresh breath and a renewed lease on life. It actually seemed that there were MORE of them, and that they were no longer keeping close to their “home zones,” but were now spreading out all over the yard.  We took a closer look and realized that they were actually living in these little huts:

Seal the Deal.

So, the other day I was cleaning the bathroom, and AFTER I cleaned it, the area around the toilet still looked like this:

The Horror!

I mean, that is GROSS. After a little inspection, I determined that all that horrible, discolored nonsense could be classified into two categories: 1) yellowing, cracking, smeared caulk and 2) years of accumulated dirt trapped in the caulk.

My feelings of disgust temporarily clouded my judgment and I decided to attempt the re-caulking project myself. We already had the supplies on hand, so I thought I would try doing the area around the toilet first, and if it turned out well, I would eventually do the rest of the bathroom, since there are areas in need of help around the tub, too.

The first step was to scrape away the old, biohazard caulk.