the basement

 

I know, I know, photos of a basement? Aren't we getting a little carried away, here? But the before and after is so amazing, we just had to share.

When we first saw the basement, it looked like this:

Pretty dismal, huh? It was also sopping wet, and we couldn't figure out why, since the house sits high atop a three-acre hill, and didn't seem like a candidate for exterior groundwater leaks. Come to find out there were no less than nine plumbing leaks down there!

One of the oddities we discovered down there was this octopus, a woodstove designed to provide auxiliary heat to the dining room:

The first thing we did down there was add light, light and more light. Well, actually, more and more light... we added five. The improvement was immediate. We could see!

  

Unfortunately, what we could see was that the basement was a filthy mess. We spent a solid month of replumbing, cleaning, parging, and painting the basement. The basement looks like this now (roll your mouse arrow over any of the photos for before and after views, or click on any of them for a larger image):

 

and remember that odd wood stove? Gone...

 

Just as an aside... the house has an oil furnace. The first thing we saw in the basement was this huge monstrosity:

an approximately 550 gallon oil tank, that was original to the house and had been brought down to the basement in pieces and welded into place probably around 1920. I thought for sure we'd finally solved the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa's final resting place.

The home inspection revealed (we thought) a tank bottom that was almost rusted through, and was presenting a serious risk of an oil spill in the basement. 550 gallons of oil? Exxon Valdez, here we come. We began referring to it, not so affectionately, as the "beast in the basement." Two weeks after we moved in, we received a letter from our oil company that we better schedule a replacement tank installation, because the tank was in such bad shape they wouldn't fill it come winter. Clearly, the beast would have to go, sooner rather than later.

So we dutifully scheduled a tank replacement, wanting to do our duty as good citizens to protect the environment, and ok, maybe also to have heat for the following winter. After an entire day and two full packs of Sawzall blades, the technicians discovered the beast was not one, but three layers of metal thick. It wouldn't have been in danger of leaking for another hundred years.

But hey, who knew? And now we have this sleek little number instead of the beast:

Nowhere near as much character, but it sure does give us more room to move around down there.

 

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