The First Walk-Through, the Basement

We walked down the first part of the stairs and decided to take the back, skinny, stairway.   To the left was...my....future office and to the right the kitchen, but before that another door.   This was the door to the basement.   By the way, I don't think I mentioned the doors yet. All the doors were solid oak doors.  Again, this is not something I ever had.  I always had hallow, white panel doors.  The doors were heavy and nice but they had old brass handles.   Ok, not that big of a deal but...

As we walked down to the basement another smell began to fill my nose.  It was a musty smell and something else.....urine.  It smelled like urine.

The stairs were bare wood and there was a shelf/nook to my right.   These walls, going down the stairs, were painted the same color as the shiny green and purple carpet bedroom.  That was strange.  Nothing else in the entire house was painted anything but flat white.

Ok, at this point I'm going to just show you the pictures.  The basement was like a maze.  It wasn't finished and it was leaking and the insulation was full of holes and evidence of mice in it.  The bank had put out air fresheners and mouse traps in every corner and there are 74 corners in this basement.  Take a moment and think about a basement.  How many corners does a basement have? My old house had 18 corners, my parents house (finished with 5 rooms) 35 corners, maybe.  (I'm exaggerating on the mouse traps but not the corners.) This basement had so many nooks and crannies and strange rooms, holes in the cinderblock walls (literally) and narrow doors, and broken windows and 2 giant sliding glass doors and 3 steps that go further down into another room and rooms that jet out from another room and...... an amazing fireplace made of stone and granite with tie-rods sticking out of it where a mantle should be and holes in the stone where heated air would flow out and lastly many of the cinderblocks were painted kelly green...... while others were painted grey, there were 2 very tall sliding glass doors that exited to the side yard (walk-out)....and there was a boiler.   No furnace.  A boiler, with pipes and gauges and big blue cylindrical things I had never seen before.

Ok.  Here are the pictures.

 

This is my husband on the walk through.  That stuff hanging is
insulation that was saturated with mouse urine and poo
and a carcass or 2.

Through the handless door is the staircase.  The other entryway was a weird, small dark room with a toilet that was not installed correctly and leaking sewage, a chimney cleanup, that strange nook in the cinderblock made no sense to us and behind the wall they had jimmied a pump with a bucket and electric wire to run the fountain upstairs.  It was the strangest room. 

       This could be my studio! 

They left a desk with a door and a firesafe filing cabinet without the key....

   

The shelf to the left of the filing cabinet is an aluminum something that
they built into the wall behind the stairs.

See the hole in the top right corner.  We were told that is for the fireplace.
What is that strange nook with the bar across it?  Why are there mirrors
and carpet on the wall.  What was this used for?  

Those are shelves with a shelf on it.


Could this be the 4th bedroom?  Our realtor told us she thinks the bank called the office the 4th bedroom.  As I mentioned though it had glass doors.   How would that work as a bedroom?   

Maybe for us this room could be a bedroom?  It has a closet....kind of ....and a window.  hmmm
That sounds expensive.  But when I was a teen I lived in the basement of my parents place.  I love it!   My parents let me graffiti the walls and I put glow-in-the-dark everywhere.  The room was my special place!

This is the "closet" for the above room.  I have no idea what the bump out is but there is clearly a leak that needs to be fixed. 

This room (the opening on the left and the following pictures)  we think may have been intended to be a sauna and steam room.  It is one of 2 spaces in this basement that has finished ceilings.   They are finished with steel i-beams and cinderblocks.

Here is that boiler area. Something is leaking here too. 

No idea what those were. 

Our realtor mentioned that these are baffles for the heating system and boiler.   Like I said, this house doesn't have a furnace.  We saw no vents anywhere.  It has hydronic radiant heating.  She told us that was a very expensive type of heating.....  I had to research it.  If you don't know what it is; it's water warmed by the boiler, pushed though the house with pumps to heat the house.  Each floor has water pipes running through it and cement layered on top of them to protect them and radiate the heat.

This is the view of the basement from the opening of the potential bedroom. 

We call this the Pepto Bismol room.  I have no idea why it is pink. 

The room on the right and below is a small room full of shelves and an old utility sink with a mirror and a sewage pipe.  Why is it pink? All pink.  Even the shelves are pink.

This is another space with shelves.  Don't know what we can do here. 

So now we have seen it all.

There is so much that needs to be done and so much money that needs to be spent and it was over our budget. Too bad.  But it was so cool! But it had only 3, real, bedrooms.  The list of things that needed to be done was long and included:
a bedroom
new carpet & floors everywhere but the kitchen
new paint
2 new windows
new appliances
moving the cooktop
extermination
major cleaning
a door on the master bathroom
a new deck on the master bedroom
a new pool? or get rid of the pool? or can it be salvaged?
how was the roof
new lighting in many areas
repair the rutted driveway
disassemble the existing rundown chicken coop or clean it
new door hardware
new faucet in the kitchen (current one was broken)
more cleaning
ceiling repairs in the kitchen
ceiling repairs about the fireplaces
repair and clean the stains on the brick of the fireplace
repair the screened-in porch
gutters?
a garage door opener
and much more.........

I would keep looking until that day with friends and the price dropped.