Basement cleanup

One of the things that has been on my to-do list for about six months or so is to remove the raised floor from the basement in the big house; you may remember that we started that last fall to get 2x4s to frame in a similar floor for the downstairs family room in the carriage house.

Well, this week was a neighborhood cleanup drive - the city comes by every couple of days and hauls off whatever you put in the alley. For free! So it was judgment day for the basement floor.

I have never been so bone-tired in my life. Every one of those horrible sodden pieces of particle-board flooring (yes, in a basement) had to be lugged up the stairs and out to the alley. About 40% of them had various colors of mold on the underside, especially on the relatively wet east end of the basement. Fortunately, the moldier they were, the softer they were, so the maul made short work of ripping them off the frame.

I donated the 2x4s back to the guy that originally installed them; he's still running two houses across the street. He was happy to have them back, too; they're building a deck between the houses, apparently. I tossed the 2x4s out one of the basement windows into the south yard, and my 11-year-old earned $10 carrying them from there onto the front porch for intermediate buffer storage.

At any rate, I took a few pictures of the (now cleaner) basement, but frankly, except to me, it still looks the same. The only real difference is that it is now drying out, because all those spongy sheets of particle board are no longer trapping moisture under them. Double-plus good!