We Found a Basement

So you know when you’re renovating your house, doing a bit of casual demo and all of a sudden you pop up a shelf board and are suddenly staring into a deep, dark abyss that leads to a secret basement that the previous owner never told you about? No? Just us?

Well that’s exactly what happened. When we bought the house, we were under the assumption that our house just had a very shallow crawl space. Come to find out, this wasn’t totally the whole truth. To Owen’s surprise, late one night when demoing the last bit of the open shelf niche in our pantry, he popped up the last bottom shelf board expecting to see floor but instead saw a ladder descending into a dark hole, about 8’ down.

Being that it was 10 o’clock at night, we waited till the next morning to go down and check it out. It turns out, the previous owner and previously hand dug out a basement beneath the entire footprint of the kitchen. Luckily it wasn’t a creepy dungeon (as one might expect), but rather based on our observations, seems to have been built as a bit of a business venture. Complete with a plumbing source, drying cabinet, and hooks for lights, we think we’ve figured out what may have been the incentive to keep it secret.

“We have no idea if the owner’s business was profitable enough to warrant this madness, but nonetheless, here we are.”

This was all obviously a bit of a surprise and has definitely impacted the overall renovation schedule. In some ways, the basement is a bit of a blessing. It will allow us better access beneath the house to re-wire and reconfigure the kitchen and will give us bonus square footage once we fix it up and add a bulkhead staircase outside to access it. This is a fair ways off and the basement is currently a moldy nightmare at the moment (hence the hazmat suit pictured above) but we are trying to stay positive.