Before and After

The dumspter arrived on Thursday. Big George sent the money and other people used it to take vacations or buy fun electronics for the house. (tempting, I must say). But we are the non traditionalists. We rented a dumpster.

When we moved into this house almost two years ago we inherited a large partially finished basement.

That leaked every time it rained.

A fact we only discovered AFTER we painted all the walls, installed carpet and fixed up a mighty lovely room for the Daughter down there. One evening everything is fine....school books were strewn across her newly carpeted floor, clean and dirty clothes kept the school books company. Practically everything she owned occupied some of the plush new square footage of her glamorous bedroom with a fireplace.

Then the snow melted and the rains began. All in one night.

And she woke up in a pond. With all her worldly possessions floating around her. Not good.

The next weekend we quickly put up new walls upstairs and created a new bedroom. All our kids now reside upstairs. The basement has been purely used for storage.

But we worried about it. Since every rain fall seems to send rain seeping in through the floors or the cracks around the fireplace, we worry. About mold.

And we sigh as we walk through the large spaces down there. All this square footage. More space to spread out. It was time to reclaim that space. (it can't hurt to add square footage in this real estate climate)

The walls that previous owners had erected didn't really work for us anyway so we decided to gut. We can make sure there is no mold hiding behind sheetrock, then do the necessary work to prevent that sneaky water from coming in again.

Which all leads to this day, demolition day.

My kids are familiar with demolition. We gutted and rebuilt half of the main floor in this house, creating a new kitchen, living room, dining room area. We spent eight months living in sheetrock dust and chaos. It was not fun.

But this time all the chaos is downstairs. Last night, after we'd worked for a few hours to get a kick start on the project, we all clunked back upstairs, to our CLEAN and (mostly) dust free living area.

Two small walls were taken down last night and I am thrilled with how much it opened up the space. I can't wait to see what todays efforts bring.

One daughter, three boys and one big daddy - all armed with hammers, crowbars and power saws. Let's see what kind of damage we can do.

Thanks for the money George. We're using it for garbage and couldn't be more thrilled.