This is undoubtably the least attractive part of the house. Due to our present circumstances, we probably won't be doing anything to dress up the basement. We have cleaned it up, including putting in new glass block windows and parging and painting a wall that had been leaking due to the destroyed gutter when we bought the house. This first picture is the entrance to the "cellar"- as steep and creepy as you might picture in a 100-year old house.
At the bottom of the stairs is a walled-off section that we assume has been used as a food storage room due to the shelves in it. That's what we're using it for!
Continuing on around (clockwise) you can see the shelves where we store all of the paint and supplies, most of which will stay with the house when we (cross our fingers) manage to sell it. Then you can see the relatively new furnace and water heater. Miracle of miracles! They were something we DIDN'T have to spend money to replace or repair!
Continuing on around is the incredibly heavy tool bench (you can see part of the glass block window just past Russ's yellow RC plane on an upper shelf), the new electric service panel Russ installed, then the opening to the outside. You can see the "Bilco" door in previous pictures from the outside. You can also see the additional posts we put in to prop up the sagging old floor upstairs. We paid someone to do that ($1,000) just to avoid the tension of raising it an inch every day until it looked more level and worrying about every creak and groan!
Still coming around, we come to the area just under and behind the stairs where we have our laundry and freezer. You can also see the hole in the wall just under the light bulb where we accessed the crawl space under the kitchen to clean out several boxes worth of bottles (booze and canning and whatever) as well as a couple of bags of trash (old detergent boxes, clothes, and I don't remember what else) before installing insulation under the floor to help keep the kitchen warmer in the winter. Lots of work that took time and effort but nobody who ever looks at this house is going to know how far it has come because they didn't see it before we did all of this.
At the bottom of the stairs is a walled-off section that we assume has been used as a food storage room due to the shelves in it. That's what we're using it for!
Continuing on around (clockwise) you can see the shelves where we store all of the paint and supplies, most of which will stay with the house when we (cross our fingers) manage to sell it. Then you can see the relatively new furnace and water heater. Miracle of miracles! They were something we DIDN'T have to spend money to replace or repair!
Continuing on around is the incredibly heavy tool bench (you can see part of the glass block window just past Russ's yellow RC plane on an upper shelf), the new electric service panel Russ installed, then the opening to the outside. You can see the "Bilco" door in previous pictures from the outside. You can also see the additional posts we put in to prop up the sagging old floor upstairs. We paid someone to do that ($1,000) just to avoid the tension of raising it an inch every day until it looked more level and worrying about every creak and groan!
Still coming around, we come to the area just under and behind the stairs where we have our laundry and freezer. You can also see the hole in the wall just under the light bulb where we accessed the crawl space under the kitchen to clean out several boxes worth of bottles (booze and canning and whatever) as well as a couple of bags of trash (old detergent boxes, clothes, and I don't remember what else) before installing insulation under the floor to help keep the kitchen warmer in the winter. Lots of work that took time and effort but nobody who ever looks at this house is going to know how far it has come because they didn't see it before we did all of this.
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