Our House, Part V: The Basement « The Xenohistorian Weblog

Our House, Part V: The Basement

This is mainly for family members, so I won’t mind if other readers move on to something else. So the folks can see what kind of place Leive & I moved into in Kentucky, here is the last in a series of pages featuring photos of the house.

Note: To keep the various links in the left-hand margin of this blog, your browser will cut off the right edge of each picture. I guess horizontal scrolling is not permitted here. Click on any picture to see the whole thing.

Sorry to keep you all waiting for so long (it has been nearly five months since I gave you Part IV). I was waiting to assemble the filing cabinet that arrived in October, but we’ve put that on the back burner. I’ll probably post a picture of it later. In the meantime, here are the other pictures from beneath the main floor of our house.

First of all, let’s go back to the kitchen (see Part 3). You probably remember that the doors to the basement and garage are next to each other, and from the kitchen’s point of view, they’re just to the left of the hallway from the front door. Here you can see the basement door open, behind Brin-Brin’s cage.

There’s a toll to go past me! One peanut, please.

Hold onto the railing, it’s a steep climb downward. At the bottom you can see another one of Leive’s decorations.

When we get to the bottom we turn right. Here are the roses on a pedestal again, now behind us.

Now ahead of us is a small bookcase, where we keep children’s videotapes.

Another right turn puts us in the first basement corridor. The main area is ahead. To the left is another corridor, leading to the bathroom and the fifth bedroom. On the right is the door to the closet under the stairs.

And now the other corridor; the bathroom is on the left. We won’t be going into the bedroom because we’ve used it strictly as a storeroom since we moved in. No more unopened boxes, but quite a few loose papers are lying around, plus two chairs and the roll-away bed from Florida. Whenever we turn it into a real bedroom, it will be the coolest part of the house, so any guests who visit us in the summer should stay in there.

The bathroom is painted blue, so Leive found a blue shower curtain with an astronomical theme. Most of the time I use this bathroom because I figured out how to work this shower first, while Leive prefers the green one on the top floor. Behind the red & white curtain is another closet. Not shown from this angle is the sink, which would be on the far left.

Back to the first corridor, now. At the end we come to a T intersection. To the left is my “den” of sorts. To the right is the door leading outside, and the future home-schooling area, for the kids we plan to adopt.

First we’ll go right. Now you can see the piano and bookcases. The table/desk is around the corner to the left. Leive hosts the Tuesday night ladies’ prayer group in here.

And here is the piano. Rezia played it a lot when she was staying with us. Now it will be used for the education of the kids. See the entry from May 18 for the story on how we got the piano.

On the right wall are all but one of the bookcases, so most of the family books are stored here.

Here is the table we’ll have the kids use for a desk. The little coffee pot on the left is the one I took to work (see the November 2 entry). Now it’s at home because I’m off for an eleven-day vacation.

Now let’s head to the other side of the basement. The area where we put the table is to the right.

Here’s another filing cabinet I forgot to tell you about earlier.

If you come by during the day and I’m not busy doing something else, you’re likely to find me here.

As you enter my “den,” you’ll pass a curio cabinet, our old stereo, and a tall wastebasket. Here’s the curio cabinet, full of dolls that used to belong to Lindy.

And the stereo; you may remember this from our house in Florida.

The glass tree on our coffee table survived the trip up from Florida, too. Leive decorated it with a bunch of silk cardinals, after finding out they are the state bird here.

And here are the two couches.

You are now approaching my desk, computer and closest reference sources.

Some of you may remember the picture of the desk I posted after Leive and Rezia put it together. Not much has changed here since then. This is where I surf the Web, answer e-mail, watch DVDs (until we get a TV set that can handle a DVD player), and work on my websites and this blog. The computer tower goes in the compartment at the lower right. Behind the monitor is an external hard drive that adds an additional 160 gigs, used mainly as an emergency backup for my work.

Next to the desk & computer is the fanciest bookcase. Alas, unlike the others, we could not fasten it to the wall, and it fell face forward within minutes after put it in place last June. It used to have glass doors in the front, but they came off (miraculously without breaking) when it fell. Now it’s a lot more stable without the doors, and the doors are in the garage until I can decide what to do with them. When I put books in it I did not even fill it halfway, so we used the top two shelves for miscellaneous videotapes.

One of the niftiest devices in the basement is this rotating tower, as tall as me. On the shelves in front I store my music cassette tapes. When it’s turned this way, my music CDs are on the left side, my computer CD-ROMs are in the shelves on the right, and in the back (turned away from the camera) is my DVD collection.

To the right of the spinning tower is Leive’s hanging rope decoration. Like the stereo, we had this in Florida; in fact, it was the largest item Leive brought with her from the Philippines. The artificial flowers in it are new, though.

Between the hanging rope decoration, a basement window and the couches is the other curio cabinet, also filled with Lindy’s dolls (the emergency supply!).