The Business End There's a roomy garage underneath the living room, and a furnace/laundry room at the foot of the stairs. This is the results of my messing around with my new picture effects program: it makes the laundry room look better than it has any hopes of doing in real life. Fine, fine, for the purists among you, here is the laundry room pre-Kenmore. We bought our first appliances on our second day in the house, when Tom made the observation that, as neat as the new house is, our clothes were still getting dirty and eventually we would have to buy new ones -- or a washer. And here's a shot of the wall of the garage, which is now even less attractive. We're doing our own earthquake retrofitting (under the guidance of a licensed retrofitter who'd rather teach us than do it himself) and the whole middle section of this wall has had the plaster knocked in so we can get at the frame. Demolition turns out to be a lot of fun! Once the plaster is off, we'll be bolting the wooden frame into the foundation -- and then moving on to do the same thing in all of the other basement rooms. Once you'd checked out these areas, you could go back upstairs, you could go look at the bedrooms, or you could go right out the downstairs door into the back yard.