Not a Dungeon Any More

I have written before about the Weird Shit in Our House (really, mostly just the basement).  As you know if you have been reading here, twitter, or facebook, I have been working on painting the basement.

Unfortunately the photos I took before I started this project were only of the furnace room.  Also unfortunately for you, that is the room I did NOT take after pictures of.  So, you will have to work with me and imagine it, ok?

The Plan: Paint every surface in an attempt to make it feel less like a dungeon.  This included painting the rafters with black paint so you couldn’t see all the pipes, rafters, wires and ductwork. Lucky me, we have a lot of built in shelves like old canning shelves (now a wine rack), a tool/workbench, a bench covered in motor oil and a bunch of bookshelves.  The floors were also very stained so they had to be painted too.

Before: This is the pre-painting furnace room.  It had unpainted block walls, a pitted and stained floor and ugly ductwork on the ceiling.   There is an old coal room/storage closet attached to this room with shelves where I store bins of christmas tree decorations and other crap that is nicely packed up.  It was undeniably spooky and depressing in here.  The other room had been sort of painted, but the walls were filthy and similarly depressing.

I should also note, there were large portions of the basement that had not been cleaned in probably 40 years, if ever since the house was built in 1927.  OMG, people, you do not want to know how much grime can accumulate in 40 years and how difficult it is to clean that shit.  That job sucked.

That is the furnace and the exposed brick wall.  You can’t tell from the photo, but these very special bricks have deep grooves running all down their length which make painting especially nightmarish.  That big hole behind the vacuum is presumably something related to the old coal furnace.

During: This is the workout room/laundry room when I had the walls all plastic wrapped like an episode of Dexter so I could spray the ceiling rafters with black paint.  In process, I broke one cheap paint sprayer and had to buy a second one.  What do you know, the second cheaper one was less likely to clog up due to the simpler design.  This job sucked.

This is the laundry side of the big room when I decided I didn’t have time to cover the walls with plastic because if I stopped spraying the paint sprayer was likely to seize up again.  So here, I just said eff it and let the overflow get all over the walls.

This picture I title “The Depths of Despair”. This is when I started to think I would never, ever finish this stupid project.  I should note that the sprayer did an ok job, but there were so many pipes, rafter and wires, I had to spend an entire day hand painting all the parts of the ceiling it missed.  That job sucked.

Then I painted the block walls. That sucked, especially on the wall that were not painted or primered.

Painting the floor sucked the least of all the painting jobs, but it still kind of sucked.

After: This is the exact same area as you see in the previous picture once I painted the ceiling (black), walls (cream) and floors (beige).  The stupid compact fluorescent light Mr. A insists we use in the basement make the ceiling look very harsh in the photos, but in person they just kind of disappear.  They actually feel quite high and spacious, even though they are really only about 7 feet high.

This is the “workout” area of the laundry/workout room.  After painting the groovy bricks on the other side of this wall, I refused to paint them again. I think it makes it look a little like a loft in there with the exposed brick. I did paint the very bottom row because they were stained from some kind of basement flood like 50 years ago.  The boxes are up on the top shelf to hide the giant old coal furnace duct holes. In person, you barely see the boxes.

It is so clean and pleasant in here now, a person can sit and fold laundry right there on the rug.

This not so great picture shows the exposed brick column and the treadmill placement in the room.  We keep a dehumidifier down there because there is no sump pump, but it is pretty dry even when we have rain.

So there it is. That is what I have been working on for much of December and the last three weeks of February.   Thank goodness that is over.  The point of this project was not really to add value to the house. It was to stop the basement from subtracting value from the house.  Compared to other houses in our historic neighborhood in some cases with 6 foot, dirt floor basements, this basement is no longer a problem.  I spent about $500 on supplies (including 2 sprayers) and I think it was well worth it.

There are only 4.5 months until we will put the house on the market, so now I am on to the next project.