Mondays–V5E7–Week Two Basement Redo and Hope Chest

I just finished my second week working on my basement. I’ve painted five of seven walls and I think that may be it for a while. I’m waiting on the delivery of a box of sample floor tile that was supposed to be delivered onFriday, but Mother Nature had other ideas. After days in the 50s and 60s, she decided to drop two to three inches of snow on us. Now, according to UPS it’s sitting on a truck somewhere at the warehouse five miles from here.

I have all kinds of ideas about what to use the basement for now that it no longer seems like a dungeon. I can’t do anything about not having very much natural light, but the almost white paint (technically, it is “Ivory Dust”) brightens it a great deal. There are only casement windows in the basement and the only one in this area is covered by the outside deck. The other windows are in the bedrooms, the laundry room and the Great Hunter’s workroom.

I bought this house 35 years ago because it had “3+” bedrooms which included the one large bedroom in the basement. (I guess this was back before there had to be an egress from the basement to qualify a room in the basement as a bedroom). At the time there were five of us in the family and three bedrooms just didn’t seem like enough, so “3+” sounded good. Two years after moving into the house, we became a family of six, so my ex built a second bedroom in the basement.

Throughout the years, all of my children have resided in the large basement bedroom at one time or another. I never worried too much about there not being an egress window since they were young and agile enough to get out of the basement ground-level windows. Several years ago I looked into having an egress window put in. But it was expensive and the amount of outdoor space needed would come perilously close to the property line between my house and my crabby neighbor’s house next door.

So now with the new bright walls, I feel like my home has been expanded and I have much more available space to spread out.

Since I was at a standstill on the floor, I decided I wanted to tackle another project…my 50-year-old “hope” chest.

After sanding the top (and getting in trouble with the Great Hunter for filling the house with dust–so he says) I’m going to stain it and then paint the body.

I don’t remember when I bought this cedar chest but back then it was traditional for young women to start collecting personal and household items for their “hope” of getting married and setting up a household. Now it’s just a treasure trove of memorability of my life.