big mess

Halloween also was the Great Basement Jack Hammering Day. It was a lot of work to get things ready for this project and it was only the beginning!



Okay, so you can see there are piles of things everywhere that came from downstairs. Mattress propped against the dining room wall, stacks of things, boxes, lamps, displaced dining room chairs, etc. When this is all over I am going to have to post a video of our house when it's together just to prove we don't live like packrats. But I admit, that is a lot of laundry; however, in our defense it was laundry sorting time and without the laundry room the sorting happened on the living room floor!

Emma was boarded (jack hammering sounds can be scary). I came home from work to find big barrels of concrete chunks in the driveway ready to be hauled off, and a thick layer of concrete dust coating the walls and floors downstairs, clinging to every object in our garage, and sneaking upstairs despite the plastic barrier. We were thrilled to turn the furnace back on in the wee hours of Friday morning after our first clean up attempt while wearing masks and goggles – that stuff is nasty -- although more rounds of cleanup remain. What a project! We are really crossing our fingers that in late November, three and a half months after the flooding, that this whole thing can be done and the house can be back to normal.

One good thing that came out of this is that we discovered we have hardwood stairs in the house. A neighbor tipped us off and after prying up not one but two layers of gross carpet and chiseling away disintegrated carpet padding, we found a little treasure, or at least great potential, in our entryway stairs! See, didn’t we say that the wet basement would mean a house project that grows exponentially? Maybe we’ll table working on the stairs until the spring. Now I’m itching to see what lies beneath the living room carpet (besides more carpet).