Polishing a Turd: Adventures in Basement Renovation

My upstairs roommate moved out in April and the pleasure of not sharing our living space made us hyper aware of the empty rooms beneath our feet, 1200 square feet of potential income separate from my pleasant upstairs existence. That’s why we started working on the basement only a couple months after finishing the upstairs. The five-year plan turned into five months.

We laid out lines of gold spray paint on the floor to evoke walls, but I couldn’t see the shape of the final product through the detritus and weird layout. I could see, however, the potential for an airy open space, with big windows that let in a surprising amount of sunlight.

The upstairs renovation made us cocky and overconfident. A couple grand, a couple weekends of twelve-hour days should be sufficient.

Cy is really good at demolition and making piles and being ruthless, so that happened quickly—sketchy walls knocked down, fetid carpet torn up, rotting drywall hauled out.

The ancient oil furnace promptly broke, of course, in the first few days of basement tinkering. It had to be replaced before we started any meaningful construction, so there went another couple grand. Electric will be way cheaper than oil, and it’s hydroelectric here, so I guess sacrificing the health of waterways is better than burning dead dinosaurs.

The job grew in complexity. Cy laid out a day-by-day plan but each task on the list took double or triple the estimated time. Carve up a cast iron tub and an absurd old wood-fired range, carry the heavy pieces out, fix all the questionable wiring the previous owner had recklessly slapped together, and then framing, and then drywalling (oh god, drywalling) and taping and mudding and texturing, activities that no sane person with a disposable income would ever take on herself rather than hiring a drywaller, but the only thing we had was time and four hands. 

So there I was, trying to help lift grotesquely heavy, brittle sheetrock over my head, or freehand cut it into appropriately sized squares to patch holes, and Cy was carrying 80 sheets one by one down the narrow stairs.

Then we were zealously mudding the ugly holes left between untidy sheets. It wasn’t pretty, none of it, but the thing about sad drywall is that once a space is painted and filled with furniture and the walls have art on them and the deep windowsills are lush with potted succulents, it doesn’t really matter. It’s insulated and fire resistant and clean.

Then Cy went to work tiling the bathroom and installing ingenious metal siding in the shower. Metal was way cheaper than plastic shower lining; frugality was the top priority in this endeavor. We recycled drywall (terrible idea), bits of lumber, leftover particleboard, faux wood paneling, paint—it was amazing.

My boss, a notorious procrastinator, was renovating her kitchen and promised me for two months that I could have her old kitchen cabinets, but with a June 1 deadline bearing down on us and no sign that she was anywhere near coming through for me, we decided to build our own out of a thrift store desk and upper cabinets and more bits of old wood. We poured another batch of concrete countertops (much smoother this time around) and Cy wrestled with the plumbing (always the plumbing).

I hope it’s obvious from the staggering laundry list of renovations that Cy did everything and had all the skills. I was there merely as a willing accomplice and a cleaner. So much cleaning, sawdust and metal dust and drywall dust and concrete dust. I lived in dust.

After the final clean we painted the floors, leftover beige in the bedrooms and a rich gray-teal in the common areas. Suddenly it looked habitable, and then Cy trimmed it out with cedar fencing (cheap) and it smelled like California after a rainstorm.

We finished on a Wednesday morning and my friend (and tenant, whoa) Carolyn was moving belongings in by the evening. The basement is a quirky space without enough storage and the light switches are in weird places and there wasn’t enough dedicated electricity to install a full range and it’s really cold, but it’s also an enormous apartment with a ton of sunlight. And it’s mine.