Procrastinet

The Basement Chronicles - Part VI

filed under: Demolishments and Renewvations , Stuff you never, ever needed to know

(Click here for Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, or VII)

I've officially reached the point in the process where I'm having trouble keeping track of what I've gotten done and when I did it. In the two weeks since the last entry I have: sealed the brick wall; put an 8" bumper of Quikwall along the bottom of it; built a landing for the stairs; taken down the ceiling over the landing; demolished the bathroom; removed all the carpeting; put up a 2nd coat of Drylok; demolished the old closet alcove; and started framing a new closet.

In the process, I've learned a Big Lesson: houses are an illusion.

To illustrate, check out this shot of the ceiling I removed:

Click "Continue reading" to find out why this means houses are an illusion.

Until you work on the construction of a home (or, in this case, the demolition), it's easy to buy into the illusion of houses. Everything seems to damn solid and "real." There are basic perceived facts, like "there's a wall there," or "there's a ceiling over my head." This is why it was so disturbing, all those months ago, when I first chopped into the drywall at the bottom of the stairs to see where our flooding was coming from - I was piercing the illusion that our house was solid.

Now I feel much the way I imagine doctors feel about the human anatomy once they've been with their first cadaver. It's all just pieces, that work a certain way to create an illusion of a whole.

At one point this weekend, I was throwing out a chunk of drywall from the demolished bathroom (the old stuff was furry with mildew) and found a little nail in it - one of the first things I had done to make the old basement "homey" was hang up pictures, and this was one of the nails I had used. But instead of being at eye level in the middle of a solid wall, it was in a jagged chunk being tossed onto a waist-high pile of similar chunks.

Here's what used to be the downstairs bathroom, including the studs that used to underpin the picture-covered wall:

There's something especially permanent-feeling about a bathroom - the toilet is such a mysterious fixture, sealed and bolted to the floor, with pools and tanks of water in it. But no - a couple hours and the whole thing is gone.

Anyway, enough with the maundering. (See earlier posts re: the strange cul-de-sacs your brain explores when you have hours and hours of physical but semi-mindless labor - all I can say is, you think it's tedious reading it, try THINKING it for 10 hours a day). Here's the nitty-gritty of the work that got done.

The bottom three steps that got removed have been replaced by a new landing:

This was my first time building with 1x8 and nails, rather than 2x4 and drywall screws (building sets, etc.) and holy cow is it easier to be precise, keep things square, etc. Here are the steps, finished and already buried in stuff for the next phases:

Here's the second Big Pile, not nearly as impressive as the first Big Pile but still a pain to bust up, bag up and schlep down the block to deposit in the dumpster for the building site next door (yes, I got permission):

And here's the corner, which used to be an alcove with a closet door on the right, which will soon be one big double-doored walk-in closet:

With Max's birthday party in four days, and my parents arriving in three days, I'm racing the clock to make the place habitable enough for guests (or, more specifically, for *us* so that our guests can have the upstairs) and to serve as a rain-out venue for the thousand or so small children who are coming...

Posted by rjt at June 22, 2004 12:09 PM