Basement Door

With one side insulated (through I think I'm going to put a sheet of foam board insulation over the top of the silver bubbles) I decided to fix the door. Everything's shifted, so the door was dragging when you opened it. I shimmed it up, filled the holes, redrilled for the hinge, primed, painted and gave it some new hardware, since the bolt that was there was useless.

Door before.

Filled in the holes with little bits of wood and wood glue.

Door after, a lovely "thunderstorm grey".

The door is slightly warped, so in order to seal it so that the draft was minimized, I've put a latch at the top and the bottom. I still need to figure out something to do for the gap at the top, and add some weatherstripping. It opens better and is much cleaner now.

I spent the rest of the day cleaning the foundation, preparing for the eventual re-pointing. The shop-vac has been absolutely key in getting in all the nooks and crannies. There's almost no original mortar left, but I did find this one piece left.

The only piece that I think features tooling.
Since new mortar won't stick to old mortar, it had to be removed.

Not sure if this was original mortar, or just left over plaster from when they were doing the walls upstairs.
The brown fuzzy stuff in the plaster is horsehair.