Serial Killer Basement

That's what I've been calling it for the last few years. Why are basements so scary? And so grungy? Here are some before pictures of mine for your viewing pleasure. You're so lucky.

The bigger problem was the stale smell that always, I mean always, wafted from the depths of our house. There's only so long you can live in an old house and blame everything on its oldness. No, this was something ... else. I was the only one who was, according to others, being overly sensitive to it. First we called Monster Vac who promptly sucked fifty some years of muck, filth, and rodent corpses from the vents. That helped. But that smell of murk lingered.

Yes. We could have spent the money elsewhere like on, say, widening doorways on the main level or heightening the hobbit doors upstairs. Yes. It would have probably helped the resale value of the house more than what I chose to do. Yes to all of that. But I couldn't take it anymore. I was starting to think the house needed this. Who knows what's happened over the years in here? I decided it needed an exorcism, and it needed me to perform it.

Someone had installed carpet in the basement. That's right. Sort of a thick brown green plush number. Not hideous, but not exactly stylin' either. The 90s version of shag. I have no idea how long it had been there. Or who had installed it. Didn't want to know. It didn't seem that old. Had I known that it, and it alone was causing those funk daddy fumes all along I would have readily ripped it out myself. But I was afraid. Afraid of what? Of what I would find under it. Turned out to be just an innocently uneven concrete floor. No dead bodies. No map of satanic ritual. No tunnel to the old headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan downtown. Four fucking years we lived with that smell. I'm getting to be a real pussy when it comes to the unknown. What happened to my fearlessness? Old house ownership is what happened. And I watch too many slasher movies.