A Beautiful Basement

I think I'm going to paint it white, he said. What do you think?

WHAT DO I THINK?

This is the wall. As you can see, a fresh coat of white paint would undoubtedly transform the appearance of the basement.

For the past three days Peter has been down in the basement making a lot of noise. It is very noisy when you demolish walls and then put up a new one. The basement is where he tunes skis during the winter. The rest of the year he rarely goes down there. But right now, in his head, it is his palace. And therefore needs to be beautified. Let me paint you a picture of the basement. It isn't finished, though at one time it sort of was. When we bought this house, one half of it was what you would consider finished. It had a bedroom with its own bathroom and fire place and the other room had a bar in it. Clearly the owners before us really loved their basement. Hallie slept in the bedroom and we turned the bar area into a playroom. On the other side was the washing machine and dryer and the usual basement appearance, icky concrete floor and walls. (The "finished" side wasn't that much better, with cheap paneling walls and the teeny tiny windows, but it had carpet on the floor.) Every time I walked down there to do laundry, I swore I would eliminate this floor from my life.

This is where Hallie's room used to be, the old fireplace is to the left.

Then came the floods. It seemed crazy, considering we live on a mountain, that we had floods in our basement, but we did, and more than once. When we changed the carpet there was a drain in the floor on the bar side, and we did what anyone would do, we cemented it up, leveled the floor and put in fresh new wall to wall. The first flood came pouring in and it was bright and sunny out. I was down there pulling up the carpet to try to save it and the water just kept coming ... through the wall. It was insane. I even found a big heavy metal pick thing and tried to break up the cement where the little drain was. I mean, why would you put a drain in a floor ... UNLESS OF COURSE YOU NEEDED ONE? When we were clearly having some supernatural occurrence where water just came flooding in for no apparent reason.

If you look closely you can see the patch where I attempted to smash through the concrete in search of the drain we had covered up! And this

floor is now in the "ski tuning room." which is shown below.

But of course, there was a reason. There was a problem with the well, which happened to be right outside the foundation wall and it was building up with water and then leaking into the basement. What a mess.

The insurance company paid for the repairs and new carpet and we were back in business.

Until the next flood.

Now, the chances of a well pushing massive amounts of water into a basement aren't very likely, but the next cause of the second flood was even more unlikely.

We had had a party. A big party. And the toilet apparently was abused (despite the fact we had rented those outhouse things). One day I innocently went down cellar to do laundry when I heard a noise. I went into Hallie's bedroom and there was water all over the floor and it was just pouring out of the bathroom. OH MY GOD. Not again! The water was pouring out of the toilet. Okay, I turned the valve on the bottom of the toilet and the water STILL kept pouring out. It was dirty water, now that I realized it, with bits of toilet paper floating in it. WHAT WAS GOING ON? I started pulling up the carpet and draping it over stools and throwing towels on the floor to stanch the flow, and more or less freaking out. Turns out that this time it was the sewer pipe backing up ... the other part of the basement was getting hit too. It was so gross. I really don't want to think about it any more.

So. We were at a crossroads. And as Peter and I stood there with shitty dripping carpet, I said that the universe had spoken. Clearly the fact that we had experienced TWO major floods in our basement was an indication that we were not supposed to be using it for actual living purposes. That event was actually the catalyst to beginning the major renovation (and addition of a third story) to our house with the intent to eliminate the basement altogether as an essential space.

The laundry room was installed on the third floor and we even switched the location of the cellar stairs -- with the new access requiring going through a bedroom as opposed to front and central in the main body of the house. For me, the basement was a distant memory ... a storage place for things you don't really need. Oh, and a place for Peter to hang out in! He even has a TV down there.

And because we had determined that it was being reformed into a true basement, the new furnace was installed in the bedroom part, with the fireplace being used as a flue. The bathroom was turned into Peter's paint room (where he rinsed paint brushes and stored such accessories) and the former bar/playroom was turned into the ski tuning room (with the skis actually on the old bar.)

So ... for the past I don't know, ten years, the basement (which of course never flooded again) has remained dry and non-essential (at least to me!) But Peter decided that he could gain some more space if he removed the shower from the bathroom. You can visualize how big a stall shower is, and that is exactly how much space he gained. He tore down the wall, removed the shower, and then pushed back the wall the few feet and put it back. Same wood. And he is thrilled beyond belief at what he has gained. I went down this morning and if I hadn't been privvy to all of the noise, I would have never guessed that anything had changed.

So, he says, I think I am going to paint this wall white.

I looked around. To the left of the potential white wall (which is some cheap paneling) is the cement block with two holes in it, kind of hacked up holes that provide access to underneath the kitchen, which does have a foundation, but really only a crawl space. (Which was added during the renovation). It is very attractive, and Peter uses the holes to store wood, so a lot of wood is sticking out of the holes. The floor is littered with paint cans and such, and is now a mixture of cement, tile (from where the bathroom part was) and bits of pieces of linoleum which was underneath the carpet, which is long gone. Some parts of the concrete wall are painted white, some are green. And yet, he believes that if he paints this tiny piece of wall, it will beautify the basement.

The mosaic of different floor treatments and if you look to the left where the foot of the desk is, you can see the drain hole for the now removed shower. The space gained is indicated by the amount of green tile that is showing. BONANZA!

And it's not as though he is a man who must complete every project he begins. In fact, to the contrary! He is a BIG project man -- who finds the finer details of finish work and polish inconsequential and pesky little items that he will surely get to later. So what is up with the desire to paint the one wall?

I don't know. I spent the past few days doing frivolous things like watch movies and read books and he created a few more feet in his beloved basement.

The one thing we have in common is that we both believed that the other wasted their time!

(I should state that since he was down there while I was taking pictures, he is quite certain that I am going to post them on the Internet and make fun of him. But no, that is not what I am doing, I am just cataloging an event in time ... a true example of life with Peter!)