Basement - A Recap

This spring after finally getting many items out of storage in the basement and into the house, plus a few EBAY sales, the basement is finally getting useable. I still have some things to do, but at least I have a shop and tool storage, plus a room to get my radio collection out where it can be appreciated and I can play around with them again. The outer walls still need to be skim coated in many places, and in the radio room I plan to continue building the wall along the foundation so I can have a nice clean wall and a good anchor for more display shelving.





I built a bench for doing smaller work on (mostly electronics) and bought plenty of shelving and plastic bins. Now all my parts, hardware, etc is sorted out, and I have a place for all paints and finish work stuff. I don't even want to think about what I went through the past 3 1/2 years looking for stuff.... or buying stuff and then finding I already had it 6 months later. I'll also be able to do some wood work down here in the winter time. This may be a temporary fix for that as there are some ideas brewing for a future shop project.




And here is the radio room. Finally dusted off and polished up after 4 years of storage. I've been collecting pre-WWII Philco and RCA sets for 15 years now. I recently made one exception as sitting on the work bench you can make out a small set that was my great-grandparents' and great-uncle's Silvertone set from 1936 that was recenly given to me. I have many others that await restoration someday when the house project slows down.... whenever that comes!



And just for a truely authentic restoration - I installed this original 1930's era antenna system on the side where I'm working now. I never had a good antenna setup in all the years I played with these old sets, but now what a difference in reception and the range on the shortwave bands I can picked up stations in Europe, Australia, and Japan!