Down to the basement!

There are 3 entrances to the basement.  One from the back staircase inside the house, one from the front of the house in that bunker area, and the other one at the back of the house.  The back entrance will probably be our main entrance because we will have our garage back there.  But for this tour, we will start at the back staircase inside and head down.

 Here is the floor plan for the basement.  I think my picture taking skills are getting worse, but what you are looking at is the front of the house to the right.  Then a family room with fireplace in the lower right corner, then if you pass through the door towards the back of the house you come to what was the original kitchen.  The if you continue around you will come to the back entrance.  The open space beside the stairway in the back of the house now has a full bathroom in it. Then what is labeled "furnace room" at the top of the plans has since been divided into 2 equal rooms, and there is a door between the two rooms and also a door was added to the wall that would bring you back around to the foyer area where the stairs come down that is labeled "hall".

 Here is the foyer with the double door entrance from the bunker area in the front of the house.  This is the room at the bottom of the stairs.  Unfortunately due to the major structural work that needs to be done on this level and the condition of the wood floors(they are sitting directly on dirt!!) we won't be able to save them.  We will be tiling all of the wood floor surfaces on this floor.

 If you turn right you will be looking into the living room area.  This fireplace will be repaired to working order.  As you can see on the right side of the picture, the foundation has sloped significantly.  The ceiling has a big gap in it from the wall and the cabinets are sloping really bad.  This is one of the major structural issues we will address first before any other work can be done in the house.  It isn't to the point of falling down yet (I mean, it's been standing for over 140 years and hasn't fallen) but it is definitely not going to last another 100 years if the problem isn't fixed.  And we all might start to walk with a slight lean!  It is that noticeable!

From that same spot looking into the living room if you turn around you will see the bottom of the stairs, and the door leading into the bedroom. 

Turning back around into the living room you can see a doorway on the right.  This leads into what use to be the kitchen.

This room will be gutted and will be used as a home gym.  The closet in the corner use to be the pantry and we will relocate the door to the end of the closet and use it for storage, mostly for extra kitchen stuff(food, appliances that aren't used often, and seasonal items) from our new kitchen upstairs since we don't have a full pantry there.  The flooring in this room will not be tile but will consist of something durable and sensible for a home gym.

 From there we will head through a door in the back of the room to the back entrance.  This will become our mudroom.  This entrance is level with the back yard patio.  This room will have tile flooring.

Turning around directly from that last picture you will be looking into the bathroom.  Prepare yourself! 

 

 This room will be gutted and completely redone(although my husband thinks the tub isn't really pink and that once we get all of the other pink out it will be more tan colored and that we can use it without removing it!!  We shall see!)  I know you might be sad about us removing the Hawaiian tiled scene on the wall but it doesn't really go with our new color scheme. ;-)

This is the view of the mudroom/back entrance from the bathroom.  Got to love that pink tile and wallpaper! 

 From the mudroom you can continue around the other side of the house and enter into one of the 2 bedrooms that will be in the basement.  This room was labeled "furnace room" on the original plan.  Because of the lack of storage throughout the entire house(especially in the bedrooms) we will be refacing the current wall cabinets and shelves and putting some doors on the closet section to create some hanging space.  This whole side of the house has a concrete floor so we will be carpeting these two rooms.  The concrete, although structurally sound, isn't perfectly level so putting hardwood or tile down would be a nightmare for our flooring guys so we just went with carpet.

This is another view of that room looking towards the back of the house windows.  Each room has 2 large windows and they let in a lot light.  This is great because the house does not have any windows, on any floor, on the East and West sides of the house.  Just in the front and rear.  But it doesn't seem dark at all.

 Coming from that bedroom into the next one, which is a little smaller, it has the same wall cabinets and we will be doing the same thing as in the other room.  

We found a sign that use to be in front of the house in this room and we might possibly clean it up and put it out front when we are done.  We will definitely have to remove the line that states "Reservations Year Round"! Haha. 

Through a very small door as seen in the middle of this picture you are back in the main hall area at the base of the stairs.  That's the basement!  Now we can head back up!