Basement Living

As I mentioned, Martha and I are living in the basement while all of this construction is going on overhead, so I thought I would write about what that’s like.

Firstly, it’s less spacious than we are used to. It’s not terrible; maybe the kind of space you would have in a summer getaway cabin. It would be more spacious except that we are living down here with most of our stuff in boxes. We already had stuff in boxes before all of this, and now we’ve got even more boxes. Our bedroom in the basement is relatively unchanged, except Martha has her altar set up there now. The white room, as we call it, has served several purposes in the past, and now serves as Martha’s home office. The larger, unfinished portion of the basement now serves as (more) storage, kitchen, and a place for my office.

The stuff that is not being stored in our basement living space is being stored in the garage. That’s some of the heavier furniture, appliances, and more boxes.

The other major thing to say about life down in the basement is that it’s loud. At least it is while the workers are working upstairs. That’s generally between 8 AM and 4 or 4 PM. Demolition and construction are both noisy processes, and we are basically living under a sounding board that magnifies a lot of the noise from above.

A minor issue is that it’s difficult to regulate the temperature. Since the thermostat is setup to target a temperature upstairs, where the vents are closed (to prevent debris from falling into them) and the outside doors are often open, it’s a bit of guesswork to try to achieve a comfortable temperature in the basement. It hasn’t been bad though, and sometimes makes it more comfortable in the basement than it is upstairs for the workers.

We also discovered that, with the boxes stacked against some shelves, our cat Gypsy found a way to climb up into the ceiling/floor above our heads. That did not look like a safe place for her to be, so I stapled cardboard over the gaps between two sets of joists, and for the gap with a duct running into it, I restacked some items to create a barrier against cat infiltration. So far it seems to be working.