Trying to End the Nightmares

I have nightmares about my house being a shack. Like, holes in the floor, wind blowing through the walls, dirt falling through the foundation walls shack. I think it stems from the basement and the problems I've been having over the past several years with water coming in. I mentioned, way back before I abandoned the blog for two years, that I had accepted a bid to put a swale in the backyard to help direct water away from the house, and that has helped *immensely*. Unfortunately, I did it too late, and there was water damage to the foundation walls, especially the west wall adjacent to the back yard, which is bulging in by an inch and a half up and down, and probably more than that parallel to the floor.

We're starting out fixing this by putting in a sump pump system. We currently have nothing of the sort, but some kind of half-ass dam system that one of our estimators told me doesn't even access all the holes in the cinder block, so it's only draining half the water. Maybe half. Anyway, these guys are going to come in and remove the floor all the way around the perimeter of the basement, put in a drainage system and then cover it all back up. Voila! Water mitigation!

Then, Joe is pretty confident he can install wall anchors in the basement walls to pull them back into alignment. This is pretty much a trust exercise for me, because NIGHTMARES, but I figure if I can trust him with my heart, I can trust him with my basement walls.

All this is leading up to finishing the basement. If we end up having a kid, we will need ROOM. Right now, the spare bedroom, always a repository for things I didn't quite know what to do with all of a sudden got ten times worse when Joe moved in. Plus the majority of the stuff in the basement, because I swear there was pretty much nothing down there before I got married. Opinions will vary on that point. But if we have to clean out the spare room to make room for a nursury, there has to be a place for that stuff too, and it would be really nice to have some storage space. Apparently, closets were not a valued commodity in the 1940's.

We've got a pile of items to get rid of; we're planning on having a garage sale sometime soon. Lots of the mound of stuff in the middle of the basement is garage sale things, so that makes me feel a little bit better about the enormity of the task of organizing.

The plan is to have a living room, laundry room, storage and an extra bathroom in the basement, and turn the current living room into a dining room, and have a smaller table in the kitchen for quick eating. Basically, we will almost double our living space. We won't take over the second floor until we have a second kid - the apartment income is designated for Joe's student loans, and we've got a ways to go before those are paid off.

Exciting plans!