Serial Killer Basement

That's what I've been calling it for the last few years. Why are basements so scary? And so grungy? Here are some before pictures of mine for your viewing pleasure. You're so lucky.

The bigger problem was the stale smell that always, I mean always, wafted from the depths of our house. There's only so long you can live in an old house and blame everything on its oldness. No, this was something ... else. I was the only one who was, according to others, being overly sensitive to it. First we called Monster Vac who promptly sucked fifty some years of muck, filth, and rodent corpses from the vents. That helped. But that smell of murk lingered.

Yes. We could have spent the money elsewhere like on, say, widening doorways on the main level or heightening the hobbit doors upstairs. Yes. It would have probably helped the resale value of the house more than what I chose to do. Yes to all of that. But I couldn't take it anymore. I was starting to think the house needed this. Who knows what's happened over the years in here? I decided it needed an exorcism, and it needed me to perform it.

Someone had installed carpet in the basement. That's right. Sort of a thick brown green plush number. Not hideous, but not exactly stylin' either. The 90s version of shag. I have no idea how long it had been there. Or who had installed it. Didn't want to know. It didn't seem that old. Had I known that it, and it alone was causing those funk daddy fumes all along I would have readily ripped it out myself. But I was afraid. Afraid of what? Of what I would find under it. Turned out to be just an innocently uneven concrete floor. No dead bodies. No map of satanic ritual. No tunnel to the old headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan downtown. Four fucking years we lived with that smell. I'm getting to be a real pussy when it comes to the unknown. What happened to my fearlessness? Old house ownership is what happened. And I watch too many slasher movies.

Head First

We bought our brick foursquare in September 2007 after living in Austria for three years. My overachieving spouse was starting grad school and I was in need of employment. We still owned a rental apartment in Vail that needed to be fixed up before selling, and that would pay for the new house. In theory anyway.

For some reason that completely escapes me now, I thought it would be punkrock to own a historic Denver square. Location was crucial and we found it in one of the great old streetcar suburb on the Northside, now referred to by gentrifiers as West Highland. The boy commutes to the university by bike, and I wanted quick access to downtown via public transportation. It was now or never to buy our first stand-alone home. We probably overpaid for a turn-of-the-century house that had been quickly revamped by a shady DIY contractor. We were fresh off the boat, new to the city, and in a hurry. We jumped. Without knowing, at all, what we were in for. Dumbfucks.

Here's an advertisement similar to what the original owner probably used to build it.

Modern Home No. 52 from the Sears Modern Homes Mail Order Catalog

UPDATE: Sold it! Thank gawd. We did a ton of work to it (none of which I blogged about because I'm lame) but it reached a breaking point and started driving me batshit crazy. Too big, too much garden maintenance, an odd floor plan, and it never really felt right. The real estate market crashed just after we bought it so we were VERY fortunate to make a profit on it. Its location next to the shops at 32nd & Lowell sold it more than anything. Well, and my super cool decor styling apparently because there was a bidding war and it sold in three days. The winning buyers wanted to buy a bunch of our furniture and our garden stuff and some other odd things, and they wanted us to get the fuck out and QUICK. It was a bit creepy and their broker was an idiot bitch but whatever, they coughed up the cash and who the hell cares. I do hope they're happy with it. Here are all the real estate photos, check out those crazy over-saturated colors.

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