The dungeon I should not be showing the public

This is the part of our house we don't speak of. This is what you see when you open our basement door.

There are a ton of little creepy rooms throughout the basement since it was divided up into, believe it or not, a separate apartment that some young guys lived in when we moved into this house.

Mr Tommy cleared it out for us...a few built-in shelving units and such that were rotted and nasty were ripped out and carried to the trash. But there are some residual moldy spots and lots of general filth. At the end of the construction on our upstairs, the guys were using the basement for their workshop to cut wood and stuff, so the dust was left behind.

We sorta swept a path through it all when we moved in, but since we were in such a hurry to move in pre-Thanksgiving, we didn't exactly do a detailed cleaning job. And, as we rearranged things upstairs, the left-over stuff: small furniture, storage stuff, books, and bikes, have all been stored throughout this main room in the basement.

Luckily, as you can see, there are doors leading off of this larger room into smaller rooms which COULD be used for storage if we took the time to store stuff properly. Then, at the very least, this larger room could be a play room of sorts. Don't laugh! You just wait...it could be good.

As you can tell from one of the first pictures, there is one benefit of this basement which is that it is a walk-out basement, so it could have plenty of light and fresh air if we took the nasty blinds off of the windows. And the floors, at the very least, which are a tile, could be cleaned and covered with rugs.

There are some definite structural issues. This exposed pipe should have been screwed into a beam, but was instead simply screwed into the plaster ceiling, which caused it to pull down parts of the plaster over time. It needs to be screwed in properly and the ceiling, of course, needs to be patched.

And, since the basement was unfinished at one point and then partially finished when they turned it into an "apartment", the walls are a hodge-podge of materials: some exposed brick (not the pretty kind), some dry-wall, and some plaster, (mainly plaster).

You have to walk through this main room to get to the laundry room, which is also in the basement. You don't even want to see that room yet. But in my pre-baby nesting frenzy, I'm hoping to make this big room something slightly cleaner, slightly more functional, slightly less creepy. I'm thinking paint, patching walls, cleaning floors, and some indoor-outdoor rugs. Nothing fancy. Our good friend, John Scott, who does lots of stuff like this to the rental homes he buys gave me these ideas.

I've been calling around to the Home Depots and Lowes stores looking for gallons of "oops" paint. Have you heard of this? They sell paint that was mixed slightly wrong for a huge discount, (like maybe $5/gal). So, we'll see. Stay tuned.