I haven’t posted since before the holidays, but we haven’t been idle in that time. Unfortunately our work just hasn’t been very interesting. Fortunately that’s finally about to change. Let me just cover what we’ve been up to, or rather down to since it’s all been in the basement.
Basement before
Over the last couple years, ever since we finished the basement apartment demo, things have been collecting in the basement. What started with the washer and dryer, some shelving with bins, and a neatly packed pallet of furniture gradually spread to take up half the basement, while the other half filled with reclaimed lumber and scrap metal. Now that we’re planning to redo the basement floor sooner rather than later, everything needs to be cleared out. We’ve been working on this project for a while now, and we’re finally done.
Basement during
Ever sine we started this project I’ve been collecting scrap metal in hopes of selling it, but the price of ferrous metal makes it barely worthwhile, so my friend Dean helped me sort out the copper and brass, which do have some value. A couple months ago, our friend Mike came by with his truck and took a big chunk of our scrap metal, using his torch to cut down the bigger pieces much faster than my tools would allow. I ripped out the old steel tub from the basement bathroom and left it in the alley with the old cast iron boiler inside (in pieces). Thanks to the scavengers it was gone within 12 hours. Aaron sorted through the BX electrical cable and we got the last few remnants cleared out. I never did find out what my 5 gallon bucket of screws and nails was worth, for all the trouble it was to fill it. At least it all got recycled, even if we didn’t make money on it.
With our three-year-old Derek’s “help” I took down the remainder of the old brick chimney. Sarah added the bricks to the pile in the back yard and I hauled out several bags of mortar. We moved all of our “stuff” up to the first floor, including the shelving. It may need to go into storage eventually, but it can stay there for the time being.
Basement after
I got the last bits of framing out, cut down and cleared out a bunch of the less useful lumber, and moved the rest up to the now quickly-filling first floor. I sold a stack of old floor boards on Craigslist, but so far that hasn’t worked for the elliptical that Sarah got from some friends and never used. We’ve got tuck pointers coming in to clean the inside of the brick walls, so we moved the elliptical, the freezer, and the washer and dryer to the center and covered them all in plastic. This was a lot of work. Sorry we haven’t been good about providing updates, but this is pretty much what we’ve done. Moving forward things should be more frequent.