28 posts tagged “basement”
I guess in this case it would be "woman the bilge pumps." As you may have seen on the news, we had a big ass storm come across Kansas last night. Flooding galore. In my basement in particular. Either because the sump pump on the south side didn't work or because so much rain fell so quickly that the sump pumps couldn't keep up.
I started in with the towels and moving furniture at 8 pm. By 9, it was the shop vac and a mop and bucket. This went on until 5 am, with another 2 hours of follow up later in the day.
I finally got some sleep between 5 and 10 am, but I am so exhausted and sore. Seriously, if some psycho killer had broken into the house last night and offered to rape and kill me, I would have said, "Yes, please, as long as I can turn off this shop vac and lie down somewhere dry while you do it." (Lest you think Hubbicula was being a slacker, he got to sleep during this torrential rain and flooding, because his thesis defense was this morning. It seemed fair.)
Now I'm at work, watching it mist ever so gently outside. If it starts raining again, I'm going to cry.
They say laughter is good for your health, so consider this a holidy/new year's gift/birthday gift for Cranky.
Hubbicula's office is in the basement and he's like a dog trying to get comfortable. He keeps moving stuff around and replacing one piece of second hand furniture with another. The one constant has been his obsession with finding a comfortable sofa or reading chair for his office.
Last week, I came home from work after a looooong day of packing and moving, and Hubbicula said, "I bought a sofa!" He was excited, I was tired, but he was really, really excited, so we drove out to Goodwill and picked up the sofa. Actually a love seat. A plaid love seat.
All I could see was that I was going to have to help him haul it down into the basement. So tired. We got it off the back of the truck and through the doorway to the basement. We even got it down to the foot of the stairs, where we foundered. On the right here you'll see Hubbicula using hand signals to indicate his love for me. Or his desire to choke my neck.
The introduction of a tape measure revealed the problem. The doorway is only 30 inches and the hallway beyond the doorway is only 35 inches. The love seat? 37 inches deep and....37 inches tall.
At this point, Hubbicula went on shoving and pushing and pulling, while I debated among a few courses of action: crying, laughing and crying, lying down on the stairs and sleeping, or choking Hubbicula's neck.
I made a few tired and cranky efforts to explain why I thought the love seat was never going to fit through the door, but eventually I gave up. I went to bed and slept, only occasionally awoken by the thumping and pounding from the basement, where something I assumed was being torn up. When I left for work in the morning, the love seat was even more firmly wedged in the doorway. Immovably wedged, so that the only way into the basement was to crawl over the love seat.
Just a few thousand staples later, we peeled the back and pried off the wood infrastructure. After that, it was as painless as...giving birth. We shoved the love seat through into the hallway, and voila! Comfortable seating. Just apply an industrial-sized bottle of Febreze.
And just so you can hear how punchy I was when it was all said and done...another video.
The Weather
I don't know if it's a general meteorological policy in Kansas or what, but it seems like every good day you have, you also have to suffer through a shitty one. Like today is already looking like. They're threatening 3-5 inches of snow, which would be fine, except apparently we first have to get through hours of scawy thunder and lightning and pouring rain. So my feet are soaked and I'm sitting here worrying about whether my basement will flood if this keeps up.
Alas, indoor plumbing, we hardly knew ye
Cold, miserable rain is bad enough, but I'll have to walk out in it every time I want to pee. Because they've turned off the water and sewage to Brain Tumor Hall. Apparently, in order to repair/install the plumbing and sewage in the basement, they've got to deprive us of toilets for a week. So there will be a sad, pathetic, steady stream of folks in BTH walking over to neighboring buildings in the rain.
People
Add to this my general annoyance with people today. I'm disappointed in them. They're unreliable, untrustworthy, and downright dodgy. They can't do simple math or fill out a form. They send snippy e-mails about matters on which they are wholly ignorant. They rely upon my non-existent psychic abilities to communicate important information. They've turned the presidential primaries into grade school playground grudge match. We hates them, we does.
You bet your sweet bippy I can.
My people, the new washer and dryer are like plus-size fashion models: big and beautiful. Through some combination of ignorance and bravado, hubby and I selected the industry's largest washing machine, which also happens to be quite energy efficient. It's a top-load, but works like a front-load, complete with a glass lid, so you can watch your delicate and not-so-delicate underthings being cleaned
Hey, how do you know it's a writer's laundry room? The typewriter:
For almost a year we've been living with the color scheme of the previous owners, as we had more pressing issues in getting the basement done. Now, at last, we've repainted in colors we like. I admit--I may have a black heart, but I'm more of a pastel person when it comes to interior design. I like light. I like airiness. Without further ado, let's take a little before/after tour. The before shots are really before--before we owned the house, so you can see the color schemes complete with the furnishings of the people who chose the wall colors. I don't have anything in general against the colors, but they're not for me..
The dining room: way too red and dark for me.
The kitchen, also too dark--made it feel cramped.
When I walked through the doors of Brain Tumor Hall this morning, it was like walking into an oven. Outside: crisp and a little humid. Inside: hot and dry. Today is day one of the basement demolition, and already they've messed up the air conditioning system. I am lucky, compared to the vast majority of office ladies in BT Hall--I have a window, through which relatively cool air comes, only occasionally laced with a whiff of tar as they re-roof the building next door.
At any rate, although I am sweating profusely, I am grateful. I am indoors and I just ate breakfast. I'm not squatting in the desert in the blazing sun, waiting for an aid agency to bring me a little food and water or for militiamen on horseback to come kill me. Similarly, although I spent part of the weekend mopping up water in my basement, at least I don't live on the Marais des Cygnes river, which yesterday crested at 20 feet above flood stage.
The worst things I've got to face is my boss' return from Paris and my ongoing struggle with the next query letter. Good to be me.
Had to add this photo of the bridge into Ottawa (which is right on the Marais des Cygnes). Lucky for them, they have flood gates that close Highway 59 when the river gets this high. The crazy thing is that this is usually more of a creek, running 20 feet below the bridge.
I put the second coat of paint on the laundry room floor and already I feel my laundrui decreasing. (Doesn't that sound like the right contraction of laundry ennui?)
Maybe I had literary ennui yesterday because I was thinking of my laundry room.
The strangest thing about the laundry room when we moved in: no dryer vent. None. No sign that there ever was one. Plenty of evidence that the dryer had been vented into the laundry room for the last 40 years--archaeological layers of lint. I vented the dryer out the window, but owing to the age of the dryer, we quickly got some archaeological lint there, too.
The good news: I still have a house. Despite the 60+ tornadoes that came through Kansas on Friday and Saturday, none of them hit my town. Poor little Greensburg--you were always a good pit stop on the drive home from college. (Also, the field trip to the Big Well was pretty cool, despite all the stupid boys spitting into it.)
The bad news: I should have built an ark. Just a small one, but still. Between 5 am and 9 am this morning, we got about ten inches of rain. Most of it is in my newly remodeled basement. It's weird, but I have never hated that basement as much as I do now. Not even when I was sheet rocking it. We live on a hill, but the ground is so saturated with water that it's leaking through the foundation. The last 5 hours or so have been a non-stop wet-vac and mop extravaganza. So glad we brought our dehumidifier from Florida, because apparently no one else in Kansas owns one.
More later. It's time to go empty the buckets.
No, not the flag of surrender, but the flag of victory! They did it on the moon, they did it at Iwo Jima, and now I feel like I should be staking a flag in my basement floor, to proclaim that I came, I saw, I remodeled.
Today was finally moving in day, but before we could crap the basement up, I snapped some after pics, so that you can see how we got from there to here.
The creepy stairwell is now creepily cheerful. Oh, never mind the mop and the rags at the bottom. That's just where we've got a little natural spring bubbling up in our basement.
Hardhat area. The ceilings are so low that there isn't much room for ventilation ducts. The cheerfulness has crept in here, too.
How the basement looked on the day we looked at the house. It was originally one big room, but on the east side we built in a bedroom. Added value, my people. Plus, more places to store our crap. The people who sold the house wanted to leave the lousy, plywood pool table. We declined. They broke it up with a sledgehammer and left it piled at the curb for the trashies to take away. Nice.
The office before looks nice from this angle, because you can't see that it didn't actually have any enclosing walls.
And of course, the fireplace, after all the evil spirits were exorcised from the mantle.
Now, I'm going to bed.
Pergo is my bitch. You heard me. I pwned that shit.
Ultimately, the worst part of the project was cutting the pieces to fit. Pergo's instructions show--I ain't making this shit up--the zen master using a hand saw to cut the stuff to fit. A hand saw. Like it's the Stone Age. Do I look like fucking Cro-Magnon Woman? A hand saw.
Anyway, we borrowed my mother's 10" radial arm saw (known in this here little corner of the world as a "chop saw." You know, for choppin' things.) We went through three blades cutting up about 30 pieces of Pergo. You'd think that pressed wood wouldn't destroy saw blades like that, but it's coated in some lovely space age polymer plastic that melts at low temperatures and completely coats the blade's teeth. As the teeth get glommed up with melted plastic, it gets harder cut through more plastic, and the plastic already stuck to the blade begins to smoke. It's a terrible, acrid blue smoke that I am 95% sure is carcinogenic. (Yeah, so maybe we would have been better off with a hand saw. You think you're so smart.)
If you're waiting for pictures of the beautiful finished floor, I'm sorry. I just didn't take any. I am so ready for this project to be over that as soon as the floor was in, I installed the baseboards and put down a drop cloth, so that hubby could move his giant beast-desk into the room for staining and varnishing.
Hubby bought beast-desk at a thrift store for some incredibly low, yet exorbitant price. Frankly, I would not have agreed to haul it away for $20. So even if he got it for free, he paid $20 more than I would have. Beast-desk weighs approximately half a hippo and is nearly that ill-tempered. It barely fits in his new office, and only fits at all because I used a circular saw to cut off an 8 inch swatch along one side. It's that kind of desk--the kind you cut a slab off to make it fit in a room. At one point in its life, beast-desk was abandoned to the elements. It has water stains up the sides and there were mudwasp nests inside the drawer column that had to be scraped out. I insisted--hubby didn't seem to mind the thought of mudwasp larvae hatching in his desk and swarming his office.
Because of the cold weather, beast-desk had to come inside to be stained and varnished, and as it is nearly impossible to move, we just moved it directly into the office to work on. We had to disassemble it to even get it down into the basement, and as far as I'm concerned that's the last time it's going anywhere. When we move, it either stays with the house, or it leaves the basement in small pieces after I break it up with a hatchet.
Oh, and if you're wondering about the color of hubby's office. This was his choice, and it's the same color he painted his last office. I like to think of it as Juvenile Cancer Ward Yellow. It's aggressively cheerful.
