There shall be light

When we moved in there was rough drywall around three of the basement walls. We saw a little water dribbling in whenever it rained, so out of curiosity one day I pulled back the drywall to see what was going on. I was sure I would find a gross moldy mess, but it was actually just a bunch of dirt and lots of snail shells(?)– oh ya, and a big friggin hole in the wall! I can’t believe we didn’t get more water in there with that big hold in the foundation wall. So I took a few pictures of the hole and then returned the drywall back to it’s original location. That wasn’t going to be a DIY job!

After googling a bit I found out that in the old days, when furnaces ran on coal, houses had a “coal chute” on the side of the house. The chute was like a mail box, but for coal. Apparently the coal delivery man would just drive up and dump your coal down the chute. Then (I guess) the home owner would go down in the basement every once in a while and shovel the coal into the furnace.

(Side note, we also found some remnants of the old furnace behind the drywall. Some portion of brick wall anyway–I was hoping for something a little more exciting–like something that could become a little hidey-hole or something. Oh well. )

This had something to do with the original furnace (I guess?)

Somewhere in the mid-century the original home owners must have converted to a gas furnace and, since they no longer had any use for the chute (and probably because it leaked water into the basement a bit when it rained), they poured a big concrete “plug” over the top of the chute door. This “plug” didn’t quite fill the entire hole in the wall though.

Obviously I immediately started thinking about turning this hole in the wall into a window. I mean, there’s already a huge hole!? How hard could it be? So I mentioned it to the architect and into the plans it went! We used the basement for storage, but wanted to do finish off the basement in a simple way, just to make the space less like a creepy troll hole.