A tour of our "dungeon"

After posting the pictures of the basement stairs, we received a comment from a friend saying it looked like the entrance to a dungeon. Well, yes, frankly, it has a very dungeon-like feel. We admit that freely. My daughter has admitted it very loudly several times when asked to work on the laundry. This is why cleaning it up became one of my priorities this week.

We really didn't take any before pictures because it was just not somewhere we wanted to spend lots of time. I'm still not done cleaning it but have made great progress. Here is a picture of the room you are in when you get to the bottom of the stairs.

The washer and dryer are on the right and the stairs comes down right between them. The heater is on the left propped up on concrete blocks. In between is junk I am trying to work through and either throw away or store in the storage room. The ceilings are about 6'4" (coincidentally, the exact height of my husband.) Some parts have the 12x12 cardboard ceiling tiles but most of that has fallen down. Doug wants it all down so he can see all the electrical and plumbing. The previous owners didn't vent their dryer outside so all the lint was just being thrown into the room. Imagine how disgusting that was! I have spent quite a bit of time vacuuming the ceiling and I'm not quite done yet. Doug, of course, vented the dryer to outside so at least the accumulation of lint is not getting worse.

The hot water heater for the first floor is down here and at some time they had evidently built a little room around it. All the walls except one are gone and that one will probably be gone by the end of today. It is so rotted out at the bottom from standing water that it isn't even touching the floor.

This area was just crammed full of old pipes they had pulled out of the ceiling, rotten wood they had left when they replaced things, trash. I have cleaned it out and vacuumed it out and you can actually stand in this area now without wishing for a hazmat suit. As I said, I believe that wall with the pink door will come out today so that the basement is one big room again. This will help light and air flow immensely.

Here is the storage room. This is the room I put all my time and effort into the last Monday. It's nothing to write home about but compared to what it was it's a palace. The amount of cobwebs, spider webs, trash, vines (growing in through the window), and undescribable stuff I swept off the floor, the ceiling and the walls was amazing. Now we can actually find things in here. Everything is on shelves and up off the floor. My daughter even said that the room looked great when I sent her down to the dungeon to bring up the laundry. High praise indeed!