Basement Blues

I love my home. I love so much about it – the coziness, the wackiness, the memories it holds. But sometimes I hate being a homeowner. It can be phenomenally terrible. How?

This is how.

Yep, that is my yard being torn up so my basement can be repaired. What’s wrong with it? Almost everything. Three out of four walls were bulging, the drain tile was rendered almost useless by mud and tree roots and the whole thing leaked like no one’s business. It was bad.

So this is the sort of shit you do to fix it up. You hire a crew to wreck your yard, wreck your basement floor and put it all back together again all so you can sleep at night knowing that your foundation won’t collapse and your husband’s assemblage of musical instruments won’t be ruined by water coming in all the damn time.

This is what real home ownership looks like. It is not all picking out midcentury sofas and Anthropologie drawer pulls. It’s not curating the perfect china cabinet or finding the right brushed brass light fixture. Home ownership is hard, repairs are hard and shelling out the cash is the hardest yet.

But you do it.

And you try not to let every lifestyle and home décor blogger out there bother you when they post a picture of their kitchen “before” and it looks like you kitchen’s “after” except 100 times better.