Basement Part Uno

Hi there!

So this is a huge project that we decided on a whim to start, and then we had to promise ourselves to finish our other on going projects after we finished this. And we're finishing this all at once.

No more project jumping.

This is part one of a long post.
Let's start with before pictures of the basement.

This is what you saw upon coming down the stairs. Jeffery took the drop ceiling out previous to this photo, after the florescent lighting fell out and exploded. He spent an evening down here with the mask on his face cleaning up that.

He also removed the deplorable casing that once covered up the furnace. You can see the discoloration on the concrete from it. (The far right of this picture use to have wood shingles that you will see an example in another photo.)

This wall was to the right in the furnace room, and the door takes you into the sewing room, which looked like this:

The light didn't work in there, it was super dark, and it smelt so moldy that I refused to step foot in there. (I am asthmatic, probably due to a lung infection caused by mold. Emily does not want to cause herself anymore problems.)

This is terrible shelving that was in the sewing room.

And the closet.

Looking back toward the stairs from the furnace room is this terrible shelving (sans shelves that we already removed)

Turning right at the bottom of the stairs, instead of straight into the furnace room, takes you into the computer room and the glorious brown trim that encompassed it. (you can just barely see the wooden shingles right of Jeffery's head.)

Here they are in all their glory. (The walls are already removed in this photo.)

This is the wall you would have seen if the walls had still been up at the time this photo was taken.

(More of that brown trim. Also, we originally thought the wood at the bottom was glued ontop of drywall... nope... it was part of the wall.)

Geared up and ready to go.

Paneling removed to find moldy drywall (not too bad as far as the mold in this post.)

I promise I did a lot of work down here in between photos.

Behind the shelving we found a support for the house painted a "lovely" color.

WARNING: TURN BACK IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE WHY WE WERE SURE TO WEAR MASKS!

Look at that delicious black mold. Yum yum.

This is what underneath that old timey wall paper and drywall looked like.

And into the sewing room, the root of the smell problem.

Under the carpet we found linoleum. Really terrible linoleum (we also peaked underneath the carpet that goes into the computer room through the other door and found even worse linoleum but that's for another day.)

Jeffery pulled the moldy drop ceiling out.

And we got to work on pulling out the linoleum so we only had bare concrete.

Another shelving covered support pole.

And I decided to get working on the brick wall, dreading every second it took to walk over there.. I reached out and touched it to find that it was plastic. I may have laughed too much at this, and said over and over, "Why couldn't the kitchen wall have been like this?"

Remember the kitchen wall?

Behind the plastic. Wonderful concrete.

Now we started the painful process of removing the wood paneling. It was no fun,

And here's when we found out that the wood paneling was not glued down but was in fact the wall! (On both sides. Notice how half the wall in the computer room is drywall and half of it is wood paneling.)

The sewing room closet had an odd triangle piece of wood attaching two sides. Jeffery guessed it housed wiring.. He was right. What is this wiring to? Oh, well this closet was an addition to this room, so were the light switched used to be was moved to the side of the closet instead of inside of the closet... Rather poorly, and not to code.

My moment of glory was kicking out the closet drywall.

Here we are back in the hall to computer room. Watch it transform.

And now it's dark so we brought out work lights.

Here's when we decided to open up the entry into the furnace room and laundry room so that I can actually get a basket through without scraping my fingers apart.

The wall on the furnace room side of the sewing room was not good, so we decided to just remove it and build a new.

Consult this video for further explanation.

We called it quits for the night and the next morning we were back down stairs.

I didn't get a photo but Jeffery managed to break a window on accident last night. Good thing we were replacing them anyway. So that was first on the agenda.

Good bye terrible thin window. Hello white, bright, energy savers.

Now we insulate.

And here he is using a gunpowder fueled nail punch to secure brand new pressure treated wood to the concrete.

We were going to leave this wall up and replace the other side's drywall and wood panels at a later date, but open inspection found that this was in fact the source of the mold issue. I cleaned and sprayed the boards, be we decided that we felt a lot better about just knocking it down and not risking our health. So here's a before photo of the wall.