When we were looking at buying this 130 year old house, the inspection revealed that there were some serious structural issues with the fondation, or I should say, there would be if we didn't take steps to prevent them now. One of the less glamorous things about owning a home is doing the work to make sure your home is structurally sound. The up side to this is that you can go to sleep at night feeling good about knowing that your house will still be standing when you wake up the next morning.
Today Brett (with the help of his fearless mother and of course my moral support) cleaned the bricks at the foundation of the house, in the basement. Now that they're clean, they can be mortared and secured, so that the house may stand for another 100 years.
The thing about basements in old homes is that most of them are usually just crawl space. Crawl space consists of dirt, cobwebs, and probably like a thousand spiders. I'm taking baby steps towards toughing up and becoming a country girl. Working in a crawl space would be like a monster step, which is why I decided to offer the cheerleading skills from my high school days along side my documentary expertise.
Above is Elaine (my courageous mother in law) spraying off ancient spider guts and cobwebs from the 19th century (most likely anyway).
The above photos are in the basement crawlspace that is under the front of the house, but there are actually two rooms in our basement towards the back of the house. They are equally as scary and filled with spiders, but could actually be used.
I desperately need to get down there to clean and organize, but have been using the cold weather as an excuse not to do these sort of things. There's some old iron work from the house that I want to use in my garden and need to clean up a little, so I'll get to it during planting season I suspect.
If we actually were able to get this space cleaned up, it would be a perfect dark room, theres running water and everything down there. Can you imagine working in this basement in the pitch darkness, gives me shivers just thinking about it! I think I'll have to spend some quality time under the house getting to know the ghosts and resident spiders before getting carried away with building a dark room :)
Yes, Elaine is fearless and has a lot of experience under old houses, bless her heart. She's good help and you're lucky to have her. I love old basements. It's nice that you have a brick floor, too. My bet is that a couple of years from now you'll be blogging about your awesome basement and showing us what unique, wonderful things you've done with it.
ReplyDeleteI see so much possibility in this basement! YES!!!!!!! for the darkroom! But I'm always creeped out by spiders so I understand your reasoning for being so hesitant.
ReplyDeleteRegan doesn't like projects, so I do most of the handiwork around here.... but I have a pretty strict no crawl space, no attic policy. Those things that have to be done in either of those areas I save for my fearless husband :)
ReplyDeleteI can't believe Regan doesn't like projects! I would die if Brett didn't help me with my endless diy obsessions. Im glad you at least are able to get him to do the dirty work for you!
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