Hammers can be overwhelming. Specially, you want a 14-18 oz finish hammer.

Assuming you live near a Home Depot, Ryobi power tools are good enough quality for a homeowner. A drill + impact driver set is a great value and will be invaluable.

This is a good answer (upvoted!) but self-levelers are not easy. For any sizable pour it takes multiple people, preparation, coordination, and skill. Correcting mistakes are difficult.

If the floor is already level but just needs to be raised 3/4” or so then some kind of plywood or cement board underlayment is easier to DIY.

Solid core door, or hang a heavy sound-absorbing curtain over the door and as much of the adjacent wall as possible.

Good advice here. The cracking paint in the upper right jamb/casing tells me the house is moving. For a 1950s house this probably means something changed recently, probably soil moisture related. Check sprinklers, downspouts, slope next to the foundation. Rot? Termites?

Your average toaster is 1500-1800W. Your average light dimmer will fry itself almost immediately. You need a Variac which will be almost the size of the toaster.

But more importantly, sous vide toast is just wrong and you should not be enabling such an abomination.

Regarding staining in your basement: water based/water borne stains and finishes are really good these days and I'd apply them in my kitchen*. My favorites are:

• TransTint dyes
• General Finishes High Performance Top Coat
• Target Coatings EM6000 (lacquer) or EM9300 (polycarbonate/polyurethane) top coats

* as long as I wasn't spraying them, that's still something that should be done with lung protection.

Sounds like a repeat of what I went through when I bought my first house. Here's what took me way too long to learn because I'm a dumbass:

1. Water comes BOTH down from above and up from below ground
2. From Above is surface water and is controlled via grading away from the house, catch basins, surface drains and downspout extensions.
3. From Below is groundwater and is controlled by french (trench) drains and sump pumps.
4. Do not try to mix the two (putting surface water into french drains or a sump is a no-no.)

OK, now that I have that off my chest:

Yes, sure, add as much soil as you can next to the house as long as you don't get too close to your bottom course of siding or stucco weep holes. You don't want to cause more rot or other problems. If your soil is relatively impermeable (see below) aand graded away from the house, you won't have any problems with *surface* water going into the basement, even if you have gaps (but no amount of grading will help with groundwater, hence the sump pump).

The gaps are mostly a concern for foundation stability or for rodent/pest intrusion. Your foundation may not care if there are gaps depending on the design. If either of these are a concern than you don't actually want topsoil, you want the base to be some kind of engineered road base or backfill mix that will compact and will be less likely to wash away, expand when wet, and is harder for rodents to dig through.

Then on top of that, top soil but "Top soil" is a loose term. If it contains a lot of organic matter and sand, then water will go right through it until it hits something like clay or silt and may drain right back under your foundation. You want plain old DIRT with a decent amount of clay in it so that when it gets wet it becomes impermeable and the water runs off of it. One alternative is heavy plastic sheeting held down by rock, bark, sand, any soil, or small children too stupid to come in from the rain.

…or the latch side needs to come down. Can you figure out how the jamb is attached to the house? Before trying to bend or shim the hinges I would try to understand the work required to fix it correctly (that is, rehang the door).

Keeping below-grade living space dry requires creating dry air space next to the foundation well below the floor level. Remember that water can come up from below as well as down from above.

You will need to excavate and add drainage against the outside of the foundation that can carry the water away faster than it can rise from below or percolate from above.

Here’s a good example: https://youtu.be/hfUc4oIVsrY

(Not an electrician but an EV owner) EV tech is changing so fast you should not skimp. Keep the biggest wire possible, keep the neutral as far as possible. If you buy a Ford F-150 Lightning they will recommend the Ford Charge Station Pro: 80A (100A circuit). I thought my 10AWG wiring would be plenty when I had it installed 7 yrs ago…