The basement

I borrowed my dad's pickup and paid a guy from the neighborhood $150 to shovel out all the rotten stucco on the floor of the basement in the big house. He carried it all up the steps in 5-gallon buckets and it took him only two days to produce the pile you see here.

It took me and my son about two hours at my dad's farm with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction to push all that dirt into a gully (there was already a pile of garbage at the bottom of it, and rather than bring that pile up, we figured we'd just put our pile with it).

Anyway, for the first time since we bought it, the air in the big house actually smells pretty good now. That rotten stucco had a lot of earthy mold smell to it, and I had hoped it would make a difference to remove it, but essentially it seems to have entirely eliminated the smell, which I hadn't really dared hope for.

So what's stucco, you ask? Turns out that stucco and plaster and mortar are all pretty much the same thing, which surprised me. Anyway, the basement walls are stacked limestone that had had stucco on it, but the utter lack of drainage for so many years put most of it on the floor. Now that it's gone, I'd really rather put some back; that's the point of having the gutters, after all.

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!

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.)