We’ve been slowly re-occupying our full house. We’ve been living all cramped up in half of it for two and a half years. The other half, the lower floor, was under renovation for waaay longer than I’d expected. But the flood that caused our renovation also disrupted the lives of everyone we knew, including my friend the contractor.
Anyway, we’re finally able to expand back to our full capacity and I finally realized the metaphor that explains what it feels like.
It feels like I’ve been sitting down for a really long time and my legs have fallen dead asleep. And now I’m standing up and the blood is flowing back to those limbs. Prickling, needling pain and pleasure intermingled.
That’s exactly what it’s like.
We our 90 percent done on half the downstairs. We have to refinish the floors and paint the walls.
For the first 6 months after the flood when I couldn’t find something I would walk downstairs to look and then remember everything was gone.
After that I stopped going down there at all, ever, even when the contractor was working.
Yesterday I went down with some friends of my daughters and they were kvelling about how great it looked.
I wonder how long it will take me to feel like it isn’t the haunted half of my house.
Could I ask, what was the sq footage of living space before you finished the basement, and what is it now at full capacity? We live in a 1200-1400 sq ft condo (which includes the deck as living space). We’re cramped and we have no storage, minus a place to hang our bikes.
Spab: Roughly speaking our upstairs is about the size of your condo. Bring the downstairs back online almost doubles the square footage, but I’m not sure if our utility/laundry room counts as living space. It’s more like a storage area with windows. You can see the floor plan.
That’s really great. Even if we could have a basement that was nothing but a place to put odds and ends, would help us. We keep one stroller in our car and the other one underneath our hanging bikes in the storage.
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