My Basement Project: where it all began....

We have a 1940s side-entrance neo-colonial in Melrose, Massachusetts. The house is 700 SF of living space on each of 2 floors plus a finished attic. In a country where people are often renovating their homes to make it better, I got it in my head that I wanted to use the space in the basement now - the last frontier. It's not because we needed the space, it's just because it was there to be used - and made to be used a lot better than it currently was being used. And not just a 'basement room' where it is comfortable enough to use a laundry - it had to be a real finished space. Tile floor, sheetrock walls, built-in cabinets for our overflow of books and a nice place to just sit out of the way.

I suppose I can say that things began Mother's Day, 2006. We had a flood in NE that amounted to a 50 year event. We had as much of a foot of water in the basement. It was dubbed the Mother's Day storm, occurring between May 9 and 17, we received almost 11 inches of rain. For a part of the world where annual rainfall is about 40 inches, that was a lot of water. We used a neighbor's recently installed garden pond pump to pump out the water (thanks Josh and Terri!) - you can see the blue hose to the left of my legs and the pump in back of me to the right.

What you can clearly see from these photos is that we have a pretty normal basement (except for the water of course). That is, junk everywhere - the catch all for stuff. There were several challenges to overcome, but I wasn't daunted (at the time). The water problem had to be solved, there needed to be better light as we have normal 'basement windows'....

the foundation is fieldstone and I wanted to expose the stone as a finished wall on the inside (stone is one of many idiosyncrasies)..... as you can see it is covered over with a layer of mortar then painted orange. The pipes need to be delt with including asbestos removal and thinking how to maximize our already low ceiling height (7'-1") with the pipes sticking down.