Big Basement Reorg, Day 3

Basement reorg done! The masonite is going to stay, because Liz needs some floor protection for when she’s stripping/refinishing wood. And also for any impromptu breakdancing competitions that might happen.
Basement reorg done! The masonite is going to stay, because Liz needs some floor protection for when she’s stripping/refinishing wood. And also for any impromptu breakdancing competitions that might happen.
Which tool do you think was the most useful, today?
We’ve had a few days to decompress and just rest/relax/loaf. And today, we decided to suit up and put a little time into some house work. The basement has been super neglected for a long time, and one of Liz’s goals for our holiday break was to do some serious reorganization.
The basement’s been a small pocket of chaos, ever since we started working full-time on the Plinko Board.
Bob’s been working in the basement, getting a lot of our electrical updated. We’ve had lights installed in the far West corner of the basement for some time, but they’ve just been hanging out, without power.
Bob was over today, helping us improve the electrical situation in the basement. While we’ve had the basement lights working in a temporary manner, we’re slowly getting them wired up more officially.
With the wall clear, there were a few more things we had to do before adding drywall. First up: installing some wood header pieces, inside the joist spaces, so that the drywall had something to grab onto. And we also wanted to add some soundproof insulation to the walls (a future plan for this space down here is to convert it into a bathroom).
Today, Liz and I decided to focus our efforts on clearing up some room in the basement. While we’ve been working a lot on installing drywall in the second floor hallway, our main goal has really been to use up the existing materials we have stored (and scattered) around the house.
Spent time tonight after work cleaning up the basement. We’ve let things go for a while down here, and it was time to do some sweeping and reorganization. It always feels like a tradeoff, doing just cleaning/organization. But with a little over two hours, we had some really nice results and a saner, more open basement area. Which we will…
We were fortunate to have Bob over today, who stayed late into the evening to finish the humidifier install to our downstairs furnace. With the cold weather kicking in and the air getting dryer, there was a concern that the new first floor flooring would suffer for it.
I started by day in the basement. The shuffle work continues, with us needing to relocate everything down here. But first, I needed to clean up this spot, which has grown a bit unorganized over the past few months.
So I guess I should start off this post with this detail: it’s our anniversary today!
But the house demands its house work time, and so we were both working to do our part during the day. We’ve got flooring guys coming on Monday, and had more prep work to finish before their arrival.
Next up was the hardest bit: removing the existing gas line. Originally, I had intended to just pop off the cap. I struggled with this a bit, and decided halfway that it would be better to remove this length of pipe entirely (which connected to the gas shutoff valve).
The laundry has been piling up. And under normal circumstances, I’d be going to the laundromat. But we’ve had a washer/dryer combo sitting in the basement for some time now, waiting to get hooked up.
We’ve punted on setting these up, choosing instead to focus on the first floor of the house. It was a conscious choice, and the bulk of our efforts have been on getting the first floor a bit more in shape, a bit more habitable.
I think that for Liz, she needs to keep active and to do things. It helps her, to keep her mind focuse on other tasks. For me, diving into ordinary chores and tasks is incredibly difficult, due to the dissonance between the mundane thing I’m doing and the world outside my window.