Then & Now…

Boy what a difference a couple months can make. In doing the previous post I looked back at all our pictures and realized the first set we took was on April 29th. That day feels like years ago. Completing the basement and finding tenants made me reflect on the various phases the house has gone through in just this short time. It’s crazy to me how a little time does put things into perspective, which brings me to a story that is absolutely hilarious to me now, but wasn’t at the time…


We always knew we wanted to turn the part of the house that went down to the basement into some type of coat or storage closet.

Basically what you read is exactly the discussion/thought process we had:

Me: “I don’t want some wierdo’s having access to the house”

Jedd: “Yeah it might be weird but we could lock it”

Me: “Yeah but it would be strange like they could walk up the stairs and stand by the door and listen to us. And what if I wanted to talk shit about them, I wouldn’t know they’d be right there, you know LISTENING”.

Jedd: “Yeah you do like to talk crap, maybe we should just make it into a closet”

Me: “Exactly there’s not a lot of storage, where are people going to put their coats”

So this all was discussed prior to even knowing we got the house. As soon as we got the house we’d already hired someone to pull down the stairs which were termite invested anyway. Unlike the rest of the house the basement had been recently carpeted, as in the carpet down there was brand spanking knew. From what I can tell the previous owner had never actually gotten around to renting the basement out.

So imagine my surprise when we get right around this point of the basement remodel…

Do you see it? The first thing to notice is something I found alarming “honey the carpet didn’t go under the stairs, um that means what do we need to get a small piece of carpet, that will look odd”. Even worse was the where the stairs had been the concrete had buckled and was noticeably uneven. In addition my on the fly decision to pull this cabinet which was oddly floating in the kitchen all on it’s own resulted in a gap between the tiles, because some brainaic had decided to cement it in.

Me: “I can’t believe we’re going to have to get someone to jack hammer out all the extra concrete and smooth it back out”

Jedd: “Yeah but I think it would look so much nicer without carpet”

Me: “What do you mean”

Jedd: “You know I think maybe we get laminate down here”

Me: “Laminate? Laminate is expensive!”

Jedd: “No more expensive than carpet, plus I can install it myself”

Me: “You can’t install it yourself are you crazy?”

I remember thinking to myself “what have we gotten ourselves into? We don’t know anything about anything”. Now remember I might have been a little melodramatic and cranky because I was spending all my time doing this…

Jedd had a clearer head “It’s all going to work out, you’ll see it’ll be fine.” And you know what once again the man was right. Maybe that’s why I let him keep this…