Stairway to Heaven

I love home projects.  Now we can cross this one off our to-do list.  We finally got stairs put in to our “crawl space” this past weekend.  We just call it a basement since it’s like 7 feet high.  I’m still ticked that I forgot to take pictures during the process.  I guess there are worse things.  So, here’s the closet we used to have…

Mark’s pulling up the carpet here the night before.  What you can’t see is the 2 x 3 ft. hatch lid.  To get to the basement you had to lift the hatch and climb down a makeshift ladder that was just a bunch of 2 x 4s nailed to some posts. 

And the finished product. 

It’s so nice having a brother-in-law who knows how to do this stuff.  Mark has been working on getting the basement prepped for the last few months.  Right at the bottom of the stairs was a cement footing that he had to jack hammer out.  Mark is glad he doesn’t have to do that again.  I ended up leaving the house with the girls that day.  So loud! 

Then two weeks ago he bought a ton of cement mix bags (which I could barely lift) and mixed and poured cement to make a small cement pad where the stairs ended.  And finally, on Friday, Mark took the day off and he and Jared got to work.  They were able to get it all done in about 7 hours.  That included an extra trip to the hardware store since they found out the poop pipe had to be moved. 

These stairs make things so much easier.  I’m always going down in the basement to get stuff, probably once a week or so.  Now, I don’t have to make sure Piper is being watched by a sibling so she doesn’t fall through the hole to her death.  Max already marked his territory down there.  He found the one patch of dirt that wasn’t covered in plastic and peed on it.  Great…

So, life it good.  Who knew stairs could make a girl this happy?  And I know for a fact Mark is pretty happy too.  The boys did a great job.  The next step is to get my treadmill down there and then make the loft into a bedroom.  So close…