So let’s get cracking. Let’s see what we have here. There’s the boat I made in the basement, one house ago, that never got launched. If the rain ever gets biblical again, I’m ready. Other than that, leisure is just a word in the dictionary. I’ve seen it in there, long ago, but I can’t remember its definition, so the boat is just in the way all the time.

Ah, yes, the white door. It’s a very old door, much older than the house, which is over a hundred years old. The house is Victorian, the door is Colonial. It had a thumb latch instead of a knob. That kind of old.

Someone who might have been good at something, you never know, but certainly wasn’t good at carpentry, framed out a barbarous opening to get out of the basement they had just boarded up. They figured wrong, I imagine, and the door didn’t fit the opening they made for it, so they cut four inches off the top of the door to make it fit.

The resulting doorway was remarkable. I appreciate remarkable things, because they are so rare. That’s what makes them remarkable, isn’t it? Anyway, that doorway was precisely the wrong height. It wasn’t basically the wrong height, or sorta the wrong height, or even demonstrably the wrong height. It was subtly, perfectly the wrong height for a six-foot-two person, which I used to be, before I started exiting the house through that door. Now I’m slightly shorter, because that door frame would catch my fontanel, which was just starting to firm up, and give me a headache every day, as if I needed another one. I have uttered bad things while passing through that doorway. I must admit, however, that scraping my scalp on that door, over and over, was ultimately good for me. It took my mind off my throbbing ankle from bashing it into the bizarrely placed I-beam in the dark a few seconds before.

That green cabinet there was a hoot. It came with the house. I opened it up the first time with a Bowie knife in my off hand, because I had no idea what I’d find in it. It was as empty as a politician’s promise, thank Jeebus. It was pretty old, and had a ghostly, faded hand drawn label that said Civil Defense, which gave me a chuckle. Wrap your head around this: In the event the Reds decide to push the button down, it appears the local citizenry was supposed to cower in this basement for safety. I’m not sure it would withstand an atomic blast. I’m afraid to be in there on a breezy day.

So let’s start peeling back the layers of this remuddling onion and see what we’ve got. Hmm, we’ve got basically nothing. That pocket you see at ground level, the one with a couple of bricks stacked on top of a concrete block, some insulation, and a raccoon’s futon, is where the foundation that holds up the back of the house is supposed to be.

There’s a random metal column, sitting on enough concrete to hold up a Kia, not a house. You can see the original sheathing on the house being revealed. Plywood is a fairly recent invention. Back a century ago, the outside of your (American, northeastern) house would be entirely sheathed in 7/8″ thick boards like these. The plywood you see there is, you guessed it, another boarded up window. We’ll put one back in there, so I can actually see what I’m cracking my shin on, at least until we get rid of that I-beam.

More openings are revealed. The basement basement is basically a two-car garage, with a window between the doors. Apparently, I’m a lucky guy. Not many people discover a free, two-car garage under their house.

I’ve always been lucky. My wife paid five bucks cover to get into the nightclub I was performing in back in the day, and luckily I married the hell out of her before she sobered up and figured out how weird I am. I’m also lucky that no one ever asks my wife if she’s lucky. I shudder to contemplate the answer.

Over on the left there, behind the bicycle, we stripped the wall and found yet another boarded up window. It inspired me to go back and review the deed for the house, and all the associated documents from the bank. I couldn’t find any former owners named Nosferatu, or Alacard, or Van Helsing, or Peter Cushing, or anything similar. I was sure I would. Who else would live like this, on purpose? It’s a dark and bloody mystery. Just like the basement.

If you’re going to get into the housing game at this level, you’re going to have to learn to roll with the punches, and the cracks on the ankle and the scrapes on the head. People with more money than me can act as they please, and write a big check and have someone competent nuke everything from orbit and set it to rights. I gots to do the mostest with the leastest, so I’m always on the lookout for a corner to cut, or more accurately, something I can save instead of replace. There, underneath that nasty plywood, I found two courses of very, very substantial timbers that ran all along the back of the house, over the original barn door openings. By some miracle they weren’t rotten, even though they’d been exposed to the weather for forever and a day. They were acting as a giant header, and the wall framing above it was nailed to it.

It’s an unusual arrangement, but it was strong as hell to have survived the depredations of the denizens of the house for a century. I liked it, and wanted to keep it, but I didn’t quite trust it, sort of like how I feel about our cat. And how she feels about me, I imagine.

At any rate, I simply beefed up the existing structure by adding four very large galvanized lag screws at each framing member. It was a beast of a job to get them in. Old lumber be tough, people. We pre-drilled and waxed the threads and prayed and cursed but they still went in hard. I rummaged around in that drawer we all have that’s filled with stuff you’ll never use, but you’re afraid to throw out. If you’re like me, you’re always in that drawer looking for something more than all the other drawers combined. I found an air wrench I got for free with an air compressor I didn’t get for free. It made that glorious farting noise as it turned that you’re familiar with if you’ve ever sat in the waiting room of a tire store.

So we’re lagging behind the house. Sounds like progress, don’t it? Even if it doesn’t sound like English.