Cleaning Out the Old - Day 2 - All About the Basements (part 1)

Basement
1: the part of a building that is wholly or partly below ground level
2: the ground floor facade or interior in Renaissance architecture
3: the lowest or fundamental part of something specifically  : the rocks underlying stratified rocks

From Merriam-Webster

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• In the northern half of the US, we have basements. In the south, not so much. It’s a regional difference that has always astonished me. I’m sure that somewhere there’s an engineer who could explain it all to me – but I really don’t care. I enjoy the wondering. 
• The South has a plethora of Storage Facilities – there’s practically one on each corner in a large city. Makes sense. The stuff has to go somewhere.
• I’ve lived in five houses in my lifetime, three of which I’ve owned. All of them have had basements. 

​I’m lucky enough to have married a northern guy who put a basement in the southern house he built. And friends, this is not just a basement. It’s the largest one I’ve ever seen – the full footprint of the house with a walkout and a window in the back. It’s divided into finished and unfinished rooms. There’s an unfinished storage area that is again, the largest of any home I’ve ever lived in. No wonder I fell in love with Dave. 
​

My Divorce House

At the time we got married, I’d lived in my divorce house for 4 years. Initially I’d scrambled to find enough inexpensive furniture for the living room from second-hand stores, family and friends. I put together a little home I was proud of there. 
During the time my daughter and I lived in the divorce house, my grandfather passed away. This was earth shaking for a thousand reasons. The bedrock (the basement, even) of my life disappeared overnight. Did I know he was dying? Of course. Was he 93 with an incredibly good life behind him? Yes. It didn’t matter. My constant, my source of unconditional love from the moment I was born, was gone. I was a mess. 

For years I’d spent at least one weekend a month up in New York with him as he began to fail. For the last couple of years, he moved south with my father and stepmother in North Carolina. He refused to let us sell his house because,
​“he might go back there someday.” 

We honored his words and waited until he passed. It was ok to put that job off as long as possible. 

The smartest thing I ever did was to take my grandmother by the hand in her last years and walk her through their house. I asked her to tell me any items that were most important to her that I keep for posterity, and what stories were attached to them. I wrote the provenance of every item down on a slip of paper and put those in the items. Those were the items I knew I would keep someday.

My grandmother had been gone for about 10 years at this point, my mother for about 25. My grandmother never saw a shiny thing she didn’t want to collect. She collected sturdy boxes in case they ever moved. A product of the Depression, she had a bomb shelter/pantry under the basement stairs full of canned goods, paper towels and God knew what else. Every closet, every cabinet, was crammed full. You had to sidle through some of the rooms with tightly packed furniture.  When my mother died, my grieving grandmother took everything of my mom’s that I didn’t want and somehow fit it into her house. I looked at her at the time and said, “You realize, this means I have to go through all of this again someday.” Crickets.

All of that was waiting for me. 

My father and I spent weeks up there. God bless him. We filled a 25-foot dumpster. We filled 2 garage bays full of furniture and goods for donation. We had an auction house take a bunch of the collectibles to sell. We had a yard sale. And still I filled a small U-Haul with stuff to take home to Baltimore. My tiny divorce house couldn’t stretch enough to hold my grandfather’s gorgeous Jacobean Revival bedroom furniture or my mother’s wicker furniture I’d always wanted. I had boxes of cut glass I wanted to keep, and collectibles the auction people didn’t want to take to my local consignment store. I kept countless photo albums to go through at home and took the family bible. 

With everything else, I was ruthless. If it didn’t have a use, I didn’t want it. 

And still… So. Much. Stuff. 

I had to do it. I broke down and rented a storage unit. 
 
(To be continued…)