The basement

So our plan for the downstairs of the carriage house is to take that clean white area and put in a warmer floor. My first wish would have been to put down heating elements and then a floating hardwood surface - but pricing that out for a 15'4"x15'4" area, I realized it would cost upwards of a few thousand dollars.

Not an option.

Remember how that area was boxed in to install a floor when I got here, though? Well, we decided to duplicate that. Unfortunately, a lot of the long 2x4s used in that structure have been built into the roof, though. But fortunately, the entire big house basement also has a wooden raised floor.

Now, that basement is not yet as dry as it should be, not by a long shot. So that wood is decomposing pretty badly in some spots and it has to come out. Mold is not an option for us. (Indeed, mold isn't actually an option for anybody, but our son is particularly sensitive to it.) So I'm killing two birds with one stone. Today's job was removing the plywood from the floor in the eastern room of the basement (or at least, from about a quarter of it).This, plus the area not yet covered but boxed in, under the leaky window on the south wall of the basement, pictured here, will give us enough lumber for the section of the carriage house we want to box in. That, plus eight sheets of plywood, will give us a nice family room area with a floor that wet feet won't freeze to this winter. We need a little more space to watch movies that isn't cluttering up our living and working area.

And at the same time, less mold-susceptible organic substances in the big house's basement! So it's a win-win.

It felt good doing something other than software installation this week. Especially the part where I took the maul and destroyed some plywood that couldn't be unscrewed due to rust and wood expansion. That was fun. (You can see the debris in the first picture.)