Very ugly basement

Running out of rooms! Oh no! Now you have to see the basement, which is a mess and needs to be completely gutted and re-drywalled and re-floored. Kevin also thinks it’s creepy. I don’t. Except for the dark part under the front porch which needs to be cleaned out because there’s a lot of old junk in there, but I don’t like being in the dark where there are spiders…

I have no “before” pictures, and you can’t really tell from these pictures because of all our crap everywhere, but it’s a big space. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen (decommissioned by the authorities 10 years ago) a bathroom, living room and laundry room and storage down there.

This was the living room area:

This was one of the bedrooms:

This was the kitchen:

This is the laundry room:

And this is the entrance where Kevin parks his bike:

There was also mold (and maybe still is…somewhere…).  Here is a before and after of mold under stairs.  The previous owners had drywalled a closet into a space under stairs outside, which had not been sealed, and were leaking nicely onto the drywall…hence mold.  The basement in general had had lots of water in it due to the perimeter drains not really existing (there was a kind of perimeter drain on one side of the house, but it didn’t actually drain anywhere, except back into the yard).  Again, hence mold.

We had the mold specialist take out the worst of the mold (meaning the stuff we could see and that he uncovered), and got rid of a lot of junk down there. There is STILL a lot of junk down there. We also put in a newer washer and dryer, although someday we hope to move the laundry up to the second floor near the bedrooms. That would be nice.

Eventually we hope to be able to use this space for more than just a place to keep all our junk that we don’t use anymore. Or that Kevin says we may use “some day”, which I have told him if I hear, that’s my cue to put that item up on User Victoria, or in the box for charity! It’s on the list, but after the outside of the house is fixed and painted, and after the deck has been sorted out. At least, that’s where it lies on the list today. So, someday I may have real “after” pictures for you. And I promise, when I do, they will appear here!