basement: some (further) update:

Remember all that water that came into our basement, the night prior to Hallowe’en? It seems so far away now, but we still haven’t returned our finished basement to normal. We’re incredibly close: compare this picture, for example (yes, our basement is a chaos of toys, but we have small kids, what do you want?), to what the basement looked like in early December, or even early November. We’re miles from that, with new floor, new couch, bookshelves returned to the walls and drilled back into place. We’ve been rearranging, also, with a few more bookcases still to be built and put into the walls. All of our fiction remains in storage, until we can get all of that settled in.

And then, of course, the unrelated foundation work we’ve had done, or on Friday, when we had to get the carpet on the stairs replaced (given the insurance folk unnecessarily cut a hole in our carpet as they were assessing, despite the fact that no water touched the carpet attached to the stairs, forcing us to replace all of it; bah!). And the secondary handyman we had in to reattach shelving, given our regular handyman was a scheduled five weeks away around Christmas. We attempted to reattach all the shelves ourselves, but new floor is thinner than our old carpeting, which made all the already-holes in our walls at least half an inch too high to simply return.

Also: as of last week, there are now shelves in the formerly underutilized closet in our spare room, that sits underneath the stairs. We’d a hot water in there before, one we’ve now moved out for the sake of a gas heater that now lives beside the furnace in the unfinished part of our basement. The closet door has been widened, and shelves put under the stairs for the sake of comic book long boxes, with the main part shelved with above/ground press boxes. I am incredibly pleased with my above/ground press storage (which holds, possibly, a third or less of backstock), allowing us to have far more space in the rest of our downstairs. Our handyman, Keith, has yet to finish one or two items, but we are so close. Maybe in a week or two we can get our fiction library back? Completely empty the book storage that sits in our sunroom?