We’ve had our fair share of dirty jobs so far in this adventure, but this one literally involves shoveling mud.

Welcome to our basement, folks! Or is it a cellar? Not sure…
Anyhoo, we – thankfully – have concrete floors down there, but all the walls are good ol’ South Carolina red clay. I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty creepy and it’s currently home to an orchestra of crickets (…and maybe a few trolls and vampires?? Jury is still out.). Our hot water heater and lots of ductwork also live down there, but we won’t be using it for much more than an extra large crawl space. I will probably make an appearance every once in a while to hang some fresh garlic from the ceiling to ward off evil spirits and call it a day.

Although this isn’t a high-traffic space for us, you know we still want it to look its best and when we arrived on the scene, it was in pretty bad shape. The big culprit here is, yet again, water damage. Since the house was vacant for several years with no power, the sump pumps in our lovely dirt-walled basement were not working…so you can imagine what happened next…yep! Mudslide. In fact, we didn’t even realize the floors were concrete until we started cleaning up because there was about an inch of dirt that had slowly washed down onto the floor over the years. Yuck!

Matthew, my brave, hardworking husband, took on the challenge of basement clean up, which entailed a lot of mud shoveling, removal of a few lovely items like a lawn chair and an old mattress/box spring, and repairing the existing sump pump, so we can avoid any repeat performances.

Rough stuff, right? (And this was after cleanup had already started…I couldn’t get a photo of the true “before!”)

Taking care of business.

But he didn’t stop there, oh no! Matthew washed and sealed the concrete floors, and had the dirt walls covered with a moisture barrier, too.

Me trying to sneak pictures of the floor-sealing progress by going down the outside steps…

Caught.

Miss Pepper checking in on the progress… “looking good, dad!”

Done!

Never thought I’d be so proud of a basement, but this baby has come a looooong way!

Our creepy little basement is looking pretty good these days…but I’m still trying to avoid it, especially after dark. 😉