bur·row (bûr, br)So if you have been living under a rock or somewhere without electricity or Turner Network Television, you may not know about the movie "The Shawshank Redemption."

In it's essence, Shawshank is a prison-break movie. Although, the hopeful tale takes twenty some years in the telling, it is still about a man, who changed how he lived, despite his horrid circumstances, and over twenty years, through incredibly patience, he tunnels his way out of the prison. He does this by nightly tapping away at his cell wall with a tiny rock hammer...this way he manages to tunnel through twenty feet of rock over twenty years...

I love this idea. This is my concept of how I'm going to dig my basement...only faster. Hopefully, it'll only take a couple of years...and I won't have to worry about that pesky warden or the other prisoners putting me in solitary or violating me in ways I don't want to discuss.

This idea seems really simple--and, I'll admit, pretty crazy--but it is wrought with potential problems I'll have to thoroughly understand before I make any real headway on it. Some of the considerations include.

1. How do I keep the house from shaking, shifting or just generally falling down and crushing me?
2. How do I keep out water? I imagine the answer to this is a sump pump, which my house already has, but I may need a supplementary one.
3. What do I do with all the dirt? My initial idea was to use all the dirt as extra insulation on the outer walls of my crawl space...I'm also beginning to wonder, if we have a lot of clay in our soil, if I can't use it to make bricks which I can then use to build walls, etc...I've got a lot to learn on this one.
4. What do I do if I run into large underground rocks? Because I'm not dynamiting anything under my house.
5. Geothermal heating? How does that work? Could I use that to my advantage as I get down deeper? So many questions? There used to be a company around here that did it?

We currently do have a Michigan basement, which for those of you who don't live in Michigan, is more of a hole in the ground under the house that used to be used to store preserves or...bodies, maybe. My family is scared of our basement...but not as scared as they are of the crawlspace... Currently we keep our freezer, furnace and water heater down there and that's about all the room there is. I'd like to eventually have enough room to move our washer and dryer down there, but more importantly, I'd like there to eventually be some real living space down there...

But that's just crazy me...me and my patience and my bucket and hand trowel...maybe someday a pick...who knows...