Much Too Smooky: The Story of a Cellar (Part One)

Our youngest daughter has this Leap Pad thing that's basically a baby iPad.  Last winter she played the same video over and over again until she had the song from it memorized.  The video was really, really stupid and had a Halloween theme and the chorus to the song said, "It's much to spooky for me!" only our daughter, who has the most endearing habit of pronouncing words wrong, sang at the top of her lungs, "It's much to smooky for me!"  It was pretty much the cutest thing ever.  

Which brings me to our basement.  I don't even know if "basement" is the best word for what lies beneath the house.  It's dark.  It's damp.  Once I saw a centipede on the wall down there the size of my femur.  

It's much too smooky for me.  

Starting from the (sub)ground up is maybe, kinda, sorta-for-now our plan as we get to work on the house.  Like I said, the cellar was dark and damp so we decided the first course of action was to wire some additional lighting so we could see while we worked.  This is both a blessing and a curse because not only can I see what I'm doing better, but also the massive spider webs and dead bug bodies are even more visible and a lot closer than I thought when they were in the shadows.  I never knew there could be so many spider egg sacs in one place in my life.  But I digress.

I've got a joke for you.  How many Kristen's does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Answer: One because that's a dumb joke.

This house was built in the late 1800s, somewhere around 1880, which means it was heated with a coal-fired boiler.  Off the main room in the cellar, there's an additional small area which was the coal room.  It's easy to see where the door to that room was and where, upon delivery, the outside door would be opened, and coal dumped down into the basement so it could be shoveled directly into the boiler to heat the house.  Once the heat was converted to a gas-fired boiler, the outside access door to the coal room was sealed up and that section of the cellar went unused.  

Before adding more lights

After wiring more lights, we decided that shoveling 100 (literal) years of dirt and mud and grime out of the empty coal room was the next course of action.  There's a hole in the room where water comes in when it rains heavily and as a result, lots of dirt and debris has piled up, making it difficult to navigate through the coal room if we need to.  There are old pipes, random pieces of plastic, and glass as well as some other interesting finds in the layers of dirt and mud accumulated over the last century.  

One of the first pieces of coal we dug out

We found several marbles in the layers of muck.

You can tell there was at one time a door separating the main room of the cellar and the coal room because of the wood frame encasing an opening in the limestone foundation walls.  Incidentally, the limestone used in the foundation of the home is from local Indiana limestone quarries.  We found lots of large chunks of limestone in the piles of dirt we scooped out and took upstairs and outside.  Rob is saving the larger pieces to use as patches in the limestone wall around the door frame, which he is also going to replace with new wood.  The old wood that he took down he's thinking he'll use to make a small table or something that we can use in the house, which is the best idea ever in the history of farmhouses, I mean come on.  

Doorway leading into coal room with layers of muck

There's so much dirt in the coal room.  I'm not even kidding, it's probably 3 feet thick.  Needless to say, we still have 3/4 of the room to dig out.  It's time consuming because we're shoveling dirt into two 5-gallon buckets and hauling those heavy things up the cellar stairs and outside where we sift them, dump the rocks, glass, and any other larger pieces into the trash and use the dirt to fill low spots around the property.  We pushed pause on the basement cleanup because of several days of rain, which made it impossible to haul and sift dirt without making a huge mess and tracking mud back into the house, and instead shifted our focus to harvesting walnuts and building a loft bed for our oldest daughter.  

Projects are never-ending around here, but that's okay.  It's satisfying to put time and effort into work we consider an investment in our family's legacy.