Basement Explorations

While you wait for the big bathroom reveal (the anticipation is thick, I can feel it) check out our basement. It's mildly interesting... and since we cleaned out a truckload of moldy junk that previous owners left in it, it's much less scary than it used to be.

I recently discovered this "A.C. 1887" carving on the basement door frame. The records are a little hazy about which mid-1880s year our house was built, but if this carving genuinely was from 1887 little A.C. probably got a good whipping for carving his initials into his parents' new house.

Venturing inside, you see the big brick fireplace I mentioned in a previous post. Kind of hard to miss, as it is enormous and sits in the dead center. It needs some work, but I like it. It gives the house a sense of history and of real purpose, as this fireplace was a workhorse instead of a luxury.

The giant crack in the stone wall behind the fireplace clearly shows why all of our floors used to slope about 6 inches from one side to the other. Not to worry though; the guys poured a new concrete base and have the house resting securely on that jack. More structural work will be happening down here in the semi-near future, but I'm trying not to think about it...

So, while we'll never be one of those families with a pool table in the basement, there are some cool historical elements in this space that remind us of how much of history it has seen. And if nothing else, it will do just fine as a home for a chest freezer and some gardening tools.