Working on the Downstairs

May 12, 2022

One of the ongoing projects that we have is sorting and organizing our way through our house.  We have done all of the large renovation work in the upstairs and on the main floor, and because we cleared them out completely and only put back what we wanted, the downstairs became a cluttered space.  It has remained largely the way it was when be bought the place except that we added even more of our own stuff.  So, we have been slowly picking our way through it, and it is continuing to transform as we take more and more stuff to the dump, give more and more away, and move things around to reorganize the area.  

Our two freezers and the spare fridge shared the small space that was the workshop, and there was another room that we called the craft room, since that was what the previous owners used it for.  We sorted through the craft room, took garbage items to the dump, and moved the two freezers and spare fridge into that room so as to more than double the size of our workshop area.  We also moved some tables around so that we now have quite a nice workshop area, although it still needs some more sorting and organizing.   

The main part of the downstairs has now been sorted and organized, but the large crawlspace area still remains untouched.  It will be interesting to see what we find in there when we finally start going through things.  One comical thing that we came across downstairs was two boxes of anti-creosote logs for the fireplace.  The idea being that you burn a log and it helps clean out your chimney.  We kept these of course, and one evening when the fire was burning well and we were heading to bed Jason went to grab one of the logs to put on the fire.  When he opened up the box we both got a good laugh.  They were not chimney logs at all; the boxes of which used to contain chimney logs were now stuffed full of old wire and burnt out or otherwise damaged plug ends.  Out of curiosity, Jason opened the other box, and sure enough it was full of similar scraps.  The boxes were full of complete garbage.  It was a perfect example of so many other aspects of the items that came with our house.

One rainy cold day we decided to refinish our stairs going from the main floor up to our upstairs.  It was a simple and fun project that turned out quite well. 

The wood of the stairs was not nice enough to sand down and refinish like we did for the floors, so instead we painted them.  We decided to go with a black and white piano key look to match the black and white of Jiji.  She seems to approve and blends in quite well.