I can't find the bleepin' hammer in this mess!

Yeah, don't try Hello from Picasa. It sucks. (Hence last post.)
Here's a more normal post, with me fighting Blogger's Image Uploader-

It all started b/c we had to replace one of the windowsills in the basement (totally rotted out, only about 2 inches worth of solid wood (hello, leaky basement, nice to see evidence of you again!). So, Saturday morning, the scene was this-

It took a LOOOOONG time to get to this stage b/c it's so difficult to find anything in the warzone that is our basement right now. We've been having this problem all summer long. We pretty much abandoned the space after the walls came down on one side for the waterproofers. There is a LOT of work to do down there, but we've been trying to finish the exterior work before it gets too cold to do anything outside.

However, I think that it would make life much easier if we had a staging area for the rest of the work. Thus, we decided on Saturday morning to take down the rest of the walls for the area that will be Aaron's workshop when we remodel the basement. Here is a picture before the walls came down-

And three hours and a lot of hammering and crowbaring and sawzalling later-



















Isn't demo great! Last night we removed the carpet (peel & stick vinyl will go in there- just to cover up the suspect old 9"x9" tiles) and I started painting the filthy, crumbly walls with this nasty elastomeric masonry paint from the Big Blue Box. It's thick and stinky and our walls seem to slurp it right up. Aaron picked "warm chincilla" which was kind of a light green-gray for the walls, but it turned out pretty depressing- like a stormy January day-yuck. Fortunately, one gallon only got me halfway across the back wall, so I'm going to change it to something a little less depressing (the idea is to WANT to work in there!) when I go back for more paint today. Hopefully, I can get the last section of the wall painted this afternoon while Aaron and his friend try to get Aaron's truck in moveable condition (that' s a story for another blog). I'm just kind of trying to get the first coat on the best I can- the wall is really hard to paint, so hopefully I can do a better job on the 2nd coat. Maybe I'll even get the floor started this afternoon! As soon as the floor gets finished and the walls are painted, we'll put up shelving and pegboard and move the tools in there so that we can get organized. We've been making little piles for each project, but we're constantly borrowing from each little pile for the next project and it just evolves into a huge mess. I'm excited to have a useable space that will make life a little easier.