Down in the Dungeon

Or Down in the Cave. Potato Cellar. (Wine Cellar? I guess we have grape juice!)

Troy's project for this winter: work on finishing the basement.
Here we go!

The staircase reminds me of one in a grandma's house. Smells like it too. Probably b/c it was built in the 40s.
Our basement has 2 halves. The half from 1946, and the other half from 1993. (This house was a mail-order kit from Montgomery Ward 60+ years ago. In the 1990's the owners added on and more than doubled the size of the house. The first half has cinderblock walls in the basement, and leaks water from outside sometimes. If we want to finish that half, we'll need to dig down on the outside and put a sealant on the walls. For now, it's a nice indoor workshop and storage area. Troy can saw and hammer stuff he's making down there while the kids are asleep 2 floors above, and they can't hear him!

The newer half has a concrete foundation, so that's the side Troy's working on.

First step, set this cement step. And move all the storage out of this room, into the other room.
Troy and his good friend set this cement step, and the boys (oh, and s) helped move all our stuff. This lower floor/foundation was a little dug out under the old upper foundation. That cinderblock wall was just left "hangin" it seemed like. We don't have a good picture showing what it looked like before, but Troy felt better about putting cement there to fill it in. Before, it seemed like maybe the house would fall down there someday. Probably not, but it feels better having the extra structural support now.

Here's a picture of their prep before setting the concrete. Still can't really see what that wall (the wall with the lightswitch) looked like with the big gap, overhanging the lower floor, b/c of the angel of this picture.


I wish I'd taken a picture of this room BEFORE the project started! This is a very messy picture, taken while they were moving all the junk to the other room. This has been our storage room since we've lived here. In fact, the super nice people who lived here before us, let us store all our stuff in here when we first arrived in Prosser, rather than have to rent a storage unit. (They moved 2 months after Troy started working here, so we lived in a 2-bedroom apartment for 7 weeks.)
Since then, Troy put some wood pallets in the center of the floor, and we stacked our remaining storage on the pallets. Kid clothes, Christmas decorations, camping supplies, etc. (You can see a little of the boxes left there.) The kids would ride around that Island of storage boxes on their scooters or skates. We have no concrete outside, so this was the next best place to ride their scooters and skate.

Here it is all in the other room now. Do we really need all this junk?