From Dust to Instagram

December 2022

There’s always a lot of dust and contractor trash bags before there’s anything that looks nice on Instagram. As with renovations, as with life.

For the longest time, one of the main hindrances to using our basement as a retreat space has been the dilemma of how people would get there. Not as in maps to our neighborhood but as in passing from the door of our house to the basement apartment entrance. Either you pass through a belly-of-the-beast basement where all the clutter goes to die, with an exposed ceiling with can’t possibly be up to code pipes and wires haphazardly appended to appliances, walls and beams. Walls are mostly dusty exposed brick, not the chic kind, bare frame of the home covered with a few cheap white boards tacked on. In this basement lives a stinky and under-managed cat litter box (to be clear: I am the absentee manager; my husband makes a strong effort). There’s a sprawling workbench covered in stuff that might be useful someday, piles of old wood that might be made into something someday. It’s scary. I don’t even like going down there, but the laundry is there, and what passes for a pantry (two shelves tacked up under the also-not-up-to-code winding stairs down from our home), so I can’t avoid it.

But surely a retreatant or Airbnb guest would like to.

The back was an easier lift. Park in our garage, walk up the stairs and approach from the back, via the “garden entrance.” Not as scary, but the garage was literally narrower than our car, and the door up the stairs from the alley rotted and unusable. To say nothing of the gross cracked and uneven concrete dogleg flooring to the side of the entrance, or the mossy green bricks in need of powerwashing. But at least not scary.

It was a job for a contractor, however, and a new garage door, neither of which were easy to source. The garage door companies shrugged and told us to hire a contractor to widen the frame, the contractors shrugged and said to work with a garage door company. Finally we found a guy to bridge the gap, and after we recovered from the sticker shock of the cost of widening a garage door, not to mention making a strategic good faith judgment call that this did not technically fall within the realm of work requiring oversight by any governing body’s permitting agency, we started hunting for a garage door.

Have you ever bought a garage door?

There are about 30 attributes requiring an active decision, and only about three of them (L, W, color) use English terminology with which I am familiar. Isn’t there just a “basic not too fancy not too nice but won’t break right away” option? No, there’s not. And once you figure out the door of your choosing, surprise, in our economic climate, it’s a twelve week waiting period.

So all that hustling to line up a contractor was followed by a very long wait for the door. 

In the mean time, my dear and handy husband used his graphic design skills and pent up maker energy to construct a decking solution to cover the dogleg concrete. A few weekends in a row, I contributed to the Rock Creek Sanctuary dream by taking the kids to a playground and giving my man freedom to use power tools. We all have a part to play. But build he did, and about one month and $500 from Lowes later, we’ve got a beautiful deck to nowhere. Next up: string lights, cafe table, and voila, you’ve got a private patio/garden cafe. Nevermind the adjacent air conditioning unit…it just adds to the sense of privacy. Maybe we’ll cover it with twinkle lights and set a potted plant on top.

Also in the mean time, as avid readers will know, we bit the bullet on termite repair, opting for a middle ground proposal that sisters potentially damaged beams with strong wood, and hired a woman to help us slay the beast with professional organizing. All of this required removing most of our stuff from the space.

While we’re at that, may as well fix up some of the jankier wiring and pipework and cover the exposed ceiling.

While we’re at that, may as well throw some drywall at it and seal up the dusty brick, fresh coat of paint.

While we’re at that, we might as well add can lights to the basement (previous situation: two raw light bulbs dangling like upside down balloons.)

A month or so later, we incrementally, accidentally, ended up with a finished basement. Scary belly-of-the-beast no longer!

Let’s not underestimate the mammoth lift involved here: deconstructing the old workbench and removing all our stuff from the scary basement so it could be retouched and turned into a nondescript organized basement took a lot of work, mostly done by my husband. Our basement stuff filled the apartment–in addition to the batch of stuff the organizer helped us move and sort through, the workbench and its endless bins and piles of might be useful someday took over the kitchen. There was about two months when you could barely carve a path through the apartment. It looked awful–it had become the scary belly-of-the-beast.

It took another month for my husband to construct a new workbench. More taking kids to playgrounds, more powertools, more happy husband. Every chance we got for a few weeks I sent him scurrying down to his little fix-it warren to build shelves and arrange tools. But by the end of the year, more or less all the crap (or as he would say, tools and equipment) languishing in the apartment kitchen had been recovered and reassigned. Now it’s a handy-person’s dream, or at least the best you can ask for in a 16-foot-wide house.

The first project my husband executed in this new space (aside from constructing the space and adjacent shelving): ironing rainbow and unicorn patches onto a purse for our four year old. What wonderful things tools can do!

As we close out 2022, we no longer have a scary basement. We have a functioning garage door, wide enough for a mini-van, with its first coat of Hale Navy paint, looking stately. We have a deck to nowhere. We’ve started installing the Instagram-worthy door knobs we ordered months ago. We’ve cleaned up the yard, sending several bags to DC’s yard waste pick-up program, and effected donation pick-up and bulk trash pick-up too. There’s painter’s tape on the ceiling in the apartment, and soon and very soon we’ll be done with the dust and trash bags, and things will be Instagram shiny. It’s all part of the process.