Building the Basement Walls

A major piece of our construction began last Thursday. Concrete blocks for the basement walls were delivered to the house. To save money, we told the basement team we would move the blocks down into the hole ourselves. The following video is of Mike and Henry moving some blocks on Thursday. On Saturday, I slid 100 blocks down to Mike, and let me tell you, those suckers are heavy!

That same night, Mike unveiled the doorway into the new part of the basement.

We decided we would let the cats walk out into the new basement, if they wanted to. They're really missing their sunroom and haven't gotten much fresh air this summer.

Only Gray One decided to venture out and had a great time exploring the cement blocks and walking on the pebbles that were serving as flooring. Once we'd had enough, we made him go back inside.

A couple of hours later, we were in the living room watching TV when Mike got up to get a drink of water.

"Gray One is outside!" he exclaimed as he passed by the dining room door.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing and rushed over. Sure enough, Gray One was perched on top of a tall stack of cement blocks. He had snuck out of the house while Mike was covering the new basement door with plastic.

But the amazing part of the story is that instead of meowing outside the new door where he had exited the house, he climbed up as close as he could get to the dining room door. He must have known he would have a better chance of being heard.

Mike opened the door and said, "Gray One, you're going to have to jump."

Right on cue, Gray One flung himself from the block, which was about three feet away and two feet below the door, and skidded to a stop in the dining room. We were quite relieved that he didn't take a nasty tumble to the bottom of the hole.

Fortunately, all went well on Friday, and when we arrived home, half of the wall was up!