Contentment in the Home - the Basement Edition

As you know by now, I live in an old house. It's in pretty decent shape....until you go to the basement. Yikes! I have a very damp basement, and it will take a good chunk of money to repair the walls and floor and make it dry, and I don't know when I'll be in a financial place to be able to do that. So what am I doing in the meantime? There are several things I've learned over the past few years that help me be content, albeit not overly happy, with my basement:

1. Keep clutter to a minimum. I have had a flooded basement several times from the sewer backing up, the worst being nearly a foot of water requiring replacement of the furnace. You know it's bad when the litter boxes are floating! At that time I had a lot of stuff on the floor of the basement, part laziness and part just having too much stuff. After that flood, because of the sewer contamination, nearly everything that had been on the floor or on lower storage shelving had to be pitched and the floor washed down with bleach. (Bless my friend's husband, who was laid off at the time and drove 2 hours to clean and bleach for me!) Since then, I've made a concerted effort to keep very little on the basement floor besides litter boxes. I've invested in 2 Rubbermade cabinets for storage, and there were built-in shelves already here. Every year, I start at the basement steps and go around the room and straighten things up, pitching trash and puttings away. I try to do this bit by bit throughout the year, but also take a whole Saturday morning and do a major clean. We have a laundry chute, and you never know what will have fallen down along with clothes! On this day I also do a thorough cleaning of the washer and dryer, tackling cobwebs and sweeping. The less I have in the basement, the less there is deal with, and I honestly think, as best an old, damp, block basement can, it looks better.

2. I replaced the old original windows with glass block. I did this within 6 months of moving into this house. The old windows were in such bad shape, that my at-the-time 6-year-old could have broken into the basement. Being a single mom, I was very concerned that it would be quite easy for someone to break into the house via the basement windows, so I was anxious to get these replaced. The new windows have vents in them for cross-ventilation of the basement, and they are much more energy efficient than the old single-pane windows that I am sure were original to the house. I chose a company from Columbus, and installation of 4 windows took about 3 hours, including cleanup. It was well worth the $425 spent.

3. Insulating. Over the past 2 years, I have used cans of expanding insulating foam to seal the seam in the basement where the house meets the concrete foundation. It doesn't look the best, but I plan on trying to improve the appearance this summer by scraping off the overflow. (That's good job on a hot summer day!) In any case, not only is the basement much warmer (as is the air coming up from the basement), but we have had a significant decrease in the number of creepy-crawlies in our home.

I can't really decorate the basement. It is not conducive to hanging anything other than shovels and things from hooks. There isn't a whole lot I can do to make it feel warm and homey, but I can make it at least tolerable to be down there doing laundry, and by keeping up with the organizing and clutter, I can live with it. This is one of those instances where I have no choice but to settle for imperfect, and if God can love an imperfect me, I can at least tolerate an imperfect basement in the home He has provided for us.