Underwear

“It’s way more fun to buy a 

necklace than it is to buy underwear.”

-Greg Tilton

I love to make places beautiful.  I love being in beautiful spaces and I have quite the vision for this house and what I want it to eventually be.  Unfortunately, I’m a long ways off from being able to do everything I want in terms of décor because this house needs a lot of what I’m going to call “underwear”. 

I think we all would agree that picking out a new area rug or furniture piece is much more exciting than spending the same amount of money on paying to have your chimney swept or your house mitigated for radon.  But the chimney needs to be swept and the radon needs to be mitigated because in the long run no area rug can make up for your house burning down or your family member developing lung cancer.

While I have done a lot of work trying to estimate costs to the best of my ability there are always those costs that will sneak out from behind a corner and getcha.  I had one said cost present itself today.

Radon mitigation can be fairly straight forward.  Dig a hole, put in a fan, vent to the outside, done.  But of course, our radon mitigation is not quite so straight forward.  When digging your hole in the slab, ideally you have rock under your slab.  Less then ideally, you have dirt.  I’ll let you guess what we have. 

Since we are planning on putting a bedroom in the basement, properly venting the radon is important to us and when you have dirt, it makes it more difficult to do that.  A way to help that is by installing French drains.  A French drain is basically a trench dug out all around the inside of your basement slab which then has rock poured into it, then a pipe, then more rock, and eventually concrete repoured over the top (if I understand correctly from what the guy was telling me).  It’s not cheap.  It’s expensive "underwear".  

So with each new piece of necessary "underwear" a "necklace" gets crossed off the list.  But we all know that if you’re not comfortable on the lowest layer, it won’t matter how cute your necklace is because all you’re going to be thinking about is how uncomfortable you are.  And we also all know, necklaces come and go in the fashion world, or in this case the home decor world, so I know there will always be one I will love.  I just might have to wait a little longer.  But at least I’ll be comfy while I wait.

{Digging the Hole}

{Venting to the outside}

{This is incomplete.  The guy wasn't done when I left,

 so I will add on more pictures once I get them}