Our Big Decision

Stairs to the basement in scarier times.

We took some time recently to evaluate our budget (aka - the gaping black hole) and have made the decision to prioritize what needs to be finished in the house. It looks a little something like this:

• We're not finishing the basement (at least not right away). This was a bit of a sock to the gut because basement reno's can be quite disturbing to the rest of a finished house -- exhibit A:

(From our old house.)

We're going to take a few lessons we learned from that and order things like flooring and doors so that when we do have room in the budget and time to complete it, things won't look inconsistent with the rest of the house.

Hopefully this gives us a bit more wiggle room in the budget to get more important rooms completed in the other two levels of the house. *fingers crossed*

The basement, and other horrible things.

When we first put an offer in on the house, we weren't allowed to see the basement. It was so full of hoarded items that you physically couldn't enter it. On inspection day, the sellers were nice enough to push enough items out of the basement (and dump it out in the back yard...until we moved in) so we could see it. At least we were pleasantly surprised to find it in great shape -- no cracks or leaks...but the SMELL, oh the smell. (Urine has a way of insulting your nose and making your eyes water; it's like a form of torture.)

With around 75% of the basement's contents rotting in the yard, we were still left with the leftovers, which had to be dealt with in order to tackle the basement and put a hex on the pee-pee smell.

Of course, I had to document some of the entertaining finds:

Wiener dog door knocker anyone?

Dog food found gathered in the ceiling. The work of squirrels or an industrious pooch?

An entire box of gummy bears. Surprisingly these hadn't been pillaged by the rats and mice.

The freezer. Scary, and one of the last things to go. We filled 5 bin liner bags full of bread (in the form of buns, pizza shells, tortillas, and loaves of every shape and size), the odd headless fish, bacon-wrapped scallops, chicken, homemade borscht and a metal tray of raspberries.

A small bunch of things worth salvaging: an antique door, metal calliper set and a box of brass knobs.

This, however, was NOT worth salvaging (and kind of scares the crap out of me).

All of the heavy cobwebs just added to the decor and overall creepy feeling of the basement.