Bye Bye Creepy Basement!

So this house, while clearly full of potential and an amazing life's calling, has also scared the bejesus out of a few folks. I'm not going to name names here, but I'll just say that I've heard references to holding a sage ceremony more than once. 

Honestly though, when we first looked at the house, I never felt weirded out. I'm not going to claim to have a strong 6th sense, but I'm a pretty aware gal. The first several times we went through the house, it was boarded up. There was no electricity. It was late summer/early fall, and as Halloween came closer I thought how we could have had an award winning haunted house without doing a damn thing except open the door. And yet I really didn't get creeped out. Not until we opened up the house, and were able to experience the basement in full daylight.

It wasn't the whole basement that gave me goosebumps. It was just one room. I actually scoured my photos to find something that showed this room, but couldn't find one. That right there tells you how much I couldn't stand it. This room felt to me as though a slightly off kilter adult son had lived in it, pinning articles to the wood paneled walls and obsessing about who knows what. The energy was lonely and scary at the same time- a combo I'm not really interested in knowing more about. 

John stands in the non-room

But other than that room, the basement, even with its nasty weird "bathroom," didn't feel that bad to me. So when John set-up his ETesque shop down there to remove a small amount of asbestos and ready the space for the crew to remove the large stuff, it was with great joy that all the interior walls came down and the space opened up. Wood paneling: gone! Gross carpet: gone! Sears Super 75 : gone, along with lots of scrap metal from pipes and what not that we simply couldn't use. A guy stepped out of Mad Max and answered my ad on Craigslist. He paid us and took it all away for recycling.  Not that I'd want to build a summer cottage there or anything, but the space is no longer so

A room with a view

creepy that I can't be in it.

When the house is remodeled, we won't be using the original basement as our active space. We'll be adding a new basement underneath some of the new construction for our TV area. The original basement, which probably needs a name all of its own, will be a utility space only. 

This whole process has really been about respecting the past of this house as much as it's been about creating a future space for our family. Sad times clearly came with the good, and while I don't mean to dismiss the sad, I feel we need to elevate the good times this house has seen. And maybe hold a sage ceremony.  Or two.