Swingin’

With the junk in the basement relegated to the shed, it opened up a lot of space in the basement. Where space=possibilities.

When we first moved into the house it had a finished basement. The basement had been claimed by the teenaged son as his pad. Think “Johnny Bravo”.

Immediately after we moved in, our noses led us to believe that Johnny Bravo had a going away par-tay in his pad. The smell of stale beer, smoke and smokin’ was overwhelming. So on the evening that we closed, the Husband ripped out the gross carpet and tore down all of the smoke saturated ceiling tiles. As an aside, he found a few interesting items stashed away above those tiles, but “nothing of any quality” in his words. The only further change we had made to the basement since those early dark days of home ownership, was to install an exterior-grade door leading to the bilco door. Johnny must have frozen his nads off sleeping down there, the only door he had between him and the outside air was a leaky storm door. Groovy.

Unfortunately just clearing out the basement didn’t re-sheetrock the marred walls, cover the cement floor stained with the ghosts of carpets past or add ceiling tiles to the ceiling scaffolding, it just made space.

With a full-on rec room/man cave not in the near-term budget, I made just a few small changes. I made swings for the girls. For little Thing Two, it was as easy as buying a bucket swing from Home Depot and installing a couple of study screw-eyes into the ceiling beam. For Thing One, I made something a little more homey.

I bought a piece of oak about 6″ wide, 2′ long and about 1″ thick, and a length of nylon rope. First I cut the wood to 18″. Then I drilled four holes in the wood, each about 1″ in from all sides. I sanded the board to ease the edges, and gave it some coats of spray polyurethane. Using strong bowline knots (thanks Dad… the rabbit comes out of the hole, around the tree, and back down the hole) and more screw eyes, the swing was ready!