Our basement’s a mess in ordinary times, but it’s reached a critical degree of disorganization because I neglected to tidy up after several recent projects, including restoration of the kitchen’s hardwood floor. (See here and here.) We also rearranged parts of the house and discombobulated the basement further, moving several pieces of stored furniture upstairs and lugging stuff down, and there was also a brief period of leakage during the eggplant incident when some water blew through the opened overflow drain and trickled downstairs; I had to spray bleach and run a dehumidifier for the day.

Here’s the work area of the basement as of last night:

I gave it a sepia filter so you’d get a nostalgic feel for the dusty old decrepit air of the place. I need to put everything away, reorganize boxes and bins, Shop-Vac the floor, and throw a lot of junk in the trash because I’m fixing to build something soon, probably a skinny oak bookcase for an underused corner of our library. And my son wants a loft bed at some point, and a friend and I are tearing the mudroom off the back of the house and cutting up some of the deck, and I need to get the basement in order because I can’t even find a screwdriver anymore without rooting through the rubble.

I’m going to post about the library in the coming weeks. That was my first major home improvement project: converting the previous owner’s red-carpeted, lace-curtained, badly arrayed TV room into a place where I could write and read and hang with the family without literally wanting to hang myself due to the red carpet, etc. I am most proud of the result.

One very minor fix of recent days I wish to share: we have PVC fence around the backyard. The gate keeps inching up every winter because of a frost heave; I’ve had to rehang the gate three times. Rather than rehanging a fourth time, I decided to close the gap at the bottom so Bones couldn’t escape. There are gaps along parts of the main fence, too, and I wanted the solution to look good. I went to Home Depot and came across a package of vinyl wainscot, which happened to be the exact width and height I needed. All I had to do was screw it onto the gate. It blended right in: