Basement Door - Progress

It's been a long time since I blogged about the basement door that Trent worked on all summer. I mentioned it briefly in this post. Who knew putting in a new basement door would take sooo longgg. But when your house is over a century old, sometimes it takes 3 or 4 months. So it's time for an overdue update. At the beginning of July, this is what the old, dilapidated, rotted basement door looked like (complete with yellow spray foam insulation everywhere):

It seriously looked like an old door in one of those horror movies. "Come down to the basemenntttt..." Perfect for Halloween. Ha.

Anyway.... moving on, you can tell we never really used this door a lot. But we needed to rebuild the door frame and install a new one that could actually be used for easy access when we start bringing in new floor beams, gravel, cement, and floor jacks to put down here. Needless to say, it only took a couple hits to knock this baby down.

The black cord you see running across in the photo is the cable for the tv. Since we have satellite, we don't use this anymore, but we will probably be keeping it and just moving it out of the way in case a future owner wants cable.

Here's the view from inside the basement once Trent got the old door removed.

A little messy to say the least...but just look at that lovely, not so stable brick wall that the door was built into. Yep, Trent had his work cut out for him with that one.

By August though, he had the new door all framed and secured. It was a tight fit at first, so he had to chisel some of the brick on one side to get it to fit. The doorway is also smaller than most, so he probably had cut a foot off of the (steel) door to get it at the right height. Rest assured though, it now opens and closes with no problem and fits pretty well in the new doorway. He did a pretty good job!

Fast forward to October, Trent's been getting all of the mortar/concrete work finished to secure the door frame to the bricks inside. No water or air is going to escape this door!

If you look closely, you can see that we have an actual, legit doorknob with a lock and key. Never had that on this door before! It's actually functional now, which is nice, and it's getting to the point where we'll actually be able to use it probably next summer, when we work more down there getting the house leveled and some of the floor beams replaced under the house.

I just couldn't resist throwing this picture in there...you know he just looks so happy to be working on this door for the third month now....

All joking aside, though....After the concrete is all dry in the door frame, Trent is going to be spraying the open, wooden part of the frame with insulation, and then he'll put the door trim back on the outside to finish it up.

It's coming along, slowly but surely. The basement is still spooky looking, but it's still a work in progress and we have a long way to go with the whole project! Maybe in the next couple of years we won't be so busy planning weddings and will actually be able to work more on house projects! I'm hoping this winter to get indoor projects done, like the hallway and maybe finishing some living room window trim that we started, oh...4 years ago! We can only hope! :)

Hosta Planting

There's no question that this summer has been a rainy one, but over the last few weeks, the weather has been nice enough that we've been able to get some work done outside (and enjoy a few summer nights outside). That includes planting some more hostas on the west side of the house. The hostas we planted last summer seem to do well here, since there is a ton of shade from the tree on this side of the house, and they are shade lovers.

We picked up three new small ones from Lowe's when we were getting materials for the basement (the current house project we've started working on this month). The two small ones in the below picture are new - the larger one on the right we planted last summer. (The large plant on the left side is the Bleeding hearts bush that blooms pink flowers in the spring).

The other new one we planted in between two of the larger ones on the other side of the basement door:

Below is a new hosta, a one-year old one, and in the upper right hand corner is my hydrangea we planted at the end of last summer. It actually came back this year after the harsh winter we had. Although there are no flowers on it yet and it's still pretty tiny. I recently gave it some plant food, and we've been getting tons of rain, which has really helped I think. I'm hoping it will bloom again someday!

Trent has started working on the basement - building a new door beneath the faux outside door we have, that you can see in the below picture. The door on the outside is actually a piece of a garage door. (We hope to update that someday). Under that is a tarp, then there are a few cement stairs, and a doorway which used to have an old wooden door that was falling apart and rotting. Trent ripped that out and is building a new doorway for our new steel door to fit in. Will share pics once it's done! Getting the basement ready is the next step in raising the living room and kitchen to where they are level, but it's a long process. After the door is done, Trent will clean up the dirt floor, mortar some of the brick wall, put down a gravel foundation on the floor, then pour concrete. We will then have a base for the new jacks to raise the living room the rest of the way. Sounds like fun, huh?

In other news, here's a pretty sunset we witnessed while driving down the road recently:

Google automatically made my photo all cool and stuff with Auto Awesome. I thought it looked pretty awesome myself.

We've enjoyed a couple small fires out back after Trent painted the firepit:

And he's currently working on painting the old grill, too:

Just needs one more coat or so, but it's looking good! Another small before and after to share when it's all done. Oh, and the bedroom shelf is pretty much finished! Super excited to share this one. Trent has worked hard on it off and on since April. He finally found time to finish it this week, and it's all moved into the bedroom. He just needs to finish filling it with clothes!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

The Basement

I did something very brave yesterday. I went down in our basement for the first time since I moved into this house 3 years ago! It was scary. But I made it through. I went with Trent, of course. I don't think I would be brave enough to go down here alone. Have you ever been into the basement of a 100+ year old house? To my surprise, dirt floor and all...it almost looked like it had potential. There's a nice big area that could be used as storage space once it's cleaned up and a cement floor is poured, etc.

I even got to see the new foundation wall from the inside. You can see it in the photo below. It's almost fully built now. We want them to try to raise the kitchen area before they put in the final blocks. The communication has really been tricky throughout this project. We've been really unsure about if they're going to raise the kitchen, like it needs to be. It almost seems as though they just wanted to build the wall and that's it. But the whole point of this project was to fix our sinking kitchen! And let me tell you, it has not moved..if anything, it has sinked further. Yesterday we measured about 2-4 inches away from level in the kitchen. As in, there is a big slope! Scary.

They're waiting until next Friday to finish, so that it will be completely dry. This photo shows the crawl space area below the kitchen. You can definitely tell the jacks need repositioned! The kitchen is the oldest space and has the least support out of the entire house. We are hoping before the crew is done they can make sure that it's raised up and level with the rest of the house. All I can say is it's been an interesting week!