Cleaning the basement

This is not your run-of-the-mill “we need to sweep the floors and knock down the cobwebs once a year” sort of basement cleaning. This is serious basement cleaning.

One of the drawbacks of doing some of the work for our home remodel ourselves is that, well, the construction guys didn’t do everything. Including the post-construction clean up. And, frankly, we haven’t gotten to the basement yet.

But it is time. (Okay, it’s well past time.)

There are sort of three parts to our basement now. The part under the new house (we’ll deal with that later…), the main part under the old house, and the smaller part under the old house (we put up a wall to separate these two sections).

We’ve been dealing with the smallest part of the basement so far. Here’s half of it… with a bunch of junk.

Here’s the other end…

Other than the trash and “leftover” pieces, the floor is a giant mess… caked with mud and gross.
I started off by sweeping it. Twice.

Better… but still bad. And now it’s cloudy down here.

(Did I mention that the old fuse box was still up? It was.)

(Farmer Doc took it down. And I realized how gross the wall is behind it…)

Back to the floors… I mopped a small section. And it was nasty. First, I had forgotten what color the floor was supposed to be. Second, not all the dirt came up after the first mopping. Third, my mop bucket was gross after just this small section.

So… I brought down the vacuum cleaner. And vacuumed the whole thing. (At least that didn’t make the basement cloudy again!)

Then I tried again with the mopping. This section has been swept twice, vacuumed, and mopped with plain water twice.

Here’s the mop bucket after that first mopping… Of a section of floor that’s about 4 feet by 2 feet. Nasty!!

After the plain-water mopping, I did some good, old-fashioned, down on my hands and knees, Cinderella-style scrubbing. With soapy/bleachy water. And… Finally… Progress! (That spot in the middle is supposed to be there. That’s where the old furnace was, and we couldn’t paint under it. Guess that’s another part of the project we need to work on…)

I’ve come so far! And there is still so far to go…

Did I mention that this part of the basement is less than 1/4 of the entire thing? Anyone think I’ll be ready to host Thanksgiving down here next week? (Without going insane in the process…?)