Category: Basement Remodel

Dig down the floor, redo the below-grade plumbing, Pour a new floor, and make the basement livable so we can demo the second floor.

Basement Ceiling Painting

March 17, 2016 / Matt / 0 Comments

We’re planning to live in the basement while we finish the other two main floors of the house at the same time. Eventually we plan to put insulation between the joists and install a drop ceiling in the basement. We also plan to insulate and drywall the exterior walls. However, because we know there will be ongoing work to run electrical, plumbing, and HVAC to the other floors, plus we’re putting in a couple of temporary walls for bedrooms, we can’t really put that in yet. At the same time, we don’t want to have the dark exposed joists and subfloor for a ceiling while we’re living in the basement. The solution is to paint the joists and the underside of the subfloor. There are other reasons to do this as well. We used a sealing primer that is mold and mildew resistant, and we used a flame retardant additive that gives it a Class A fire rating. If the paint is exposed to fire, it will char and create a protective barrier that prevents the wood from catching on fire.

Sarah painting

Because we’re planning to stain and seal the concrete, we wanted to do the painting before the floor was poured. The paint sprayer has a way of coating everything in a mist of paint that wouldn’t be fun to remove and it’s a large space to put down drop cloths. It was a good thing we did because the flame retardant makes the paint thinner than usual, and when we started spraying the paint dripped off the rough sawn lumber rather than soaking in. We discovered that a roller works a lot better than the sprayer to get the paint worked into the wood, but even so it was going to take more than one coat and the roller was way too slow.

Slow progress

First coat with sprayer

In Progress

Second sprayer coat

We went back to using the paint sprayer, but in light passes. Even so, it went through five gallon buckets of paint fast. It took three coats to get to an acceptable level, and we went through fifteen gallons of paint in the process. After all of that, there are still places where the dark wood peeks through and other spots where the wood stained the paint yellow. Ultimately, it’s a basement. Nearly all of this will be covered up by the drop ceiling when we eventually finish it, and it’s a big improvement over how it looked before.

Back Basement Steps

December 2, 2015 / Matt / 0 Comments

Formed steps

Our concrete mason, Mario, was back this past Saturday building the forms for the stairs. He pointed out that the basement drain we put in was too high. Somehow, between the time we put it in and when he came by it had lifted by about an inch, which I confirmed with the laser level. Since I needed to adjust it anyway, he asked if I could center it in the landing because it would be easier for him to slope the landing to it. That meant not just shortening the length of pipe, but adding an elbow that I fortunately already had.

Drain reposition

I got that taken care of Saturday afternoon, and Mario was back on Monday to do the pour. He wound up tenting the whole operation with a tarp to keep out the rain. Yesterday he came back out to remove the tarp, clear the forms from the basement footing curb, and make sure everything looked good. We’re pretty happy with the finished results, and we plan to bring him back to pour the basement floor once the plumbers finish their work. If you need a concrete mason in the Chicago and Northwest Indiana area, we recommend MG Concrete.

Finished steps

It was snowing this morning when I snapped a photo of the finished stairs. I need to check the basement and see if the drain is working. I also plan to grind down the bit of footing stone that is proud of the landing by a couple inches so we don’t have a tripping hazard. Hopefully I can get some photos of the finished footing curb as well.

Back Steps Demo

October 22, 2015 / Matt / 0 Comments

Back steps

This project was a quick one, but it portends bigger progress afoot. When we took down our back porch we left the stairs from the first floor down to the ground and the steps from there down to the basement. In fact, I shored up the structure underneath it, Matt B and Dean built a railing for it, and Sarah and Matt B cut a new piece of plywood for the floor of it, all so we could have usable back steps and a way to get from inside the house to the back yard. After I took out the concrete steps that led into the basement to make the ramp, the wooden porch steps to the side remained as a safer way to get in and out of the basement. Well, this past weekend I demolished the back steps.

Demo in progress

This is in preparation for the new concrete retaining wall and steps that will lead from ground level down to the basement. We’re replacing the existing retaining wall and steps because we want to put a deck on the back of the house, which means the stairs need to go to the left instead of straight or right as they do now. It actually makes more sense to go to the left anyway, since that’s the side of the house that has the sidewalk to the front.

Steps removed

Once the new wall and stairs are in place, we’ll build some temporary stairs down from the sliding door, since we won’t have the deck for some time. In the mean time we’re going around to the front or climbing in and out, sometimes with the help of a step-ladder. Hopefully the concrete guy will be starting in the next few days and we can get the temporary stairs built in the next few weeks. The plumbers finally started yesterday and I met with some tuck pointers that should be able to fix up the basement door and window openings in a couple of weeks, and last night we picked up the new exterior door for the basement, so we’re making progress on a few fronts.

Garage Demo

April 6, 2015 / Matt / 0 Comments

The garage (doors removed)

Our whirlwind of demo continues with the destruction of our terrible, terrible garage. The garage is a tragic story, really. A perfectly good, new, professionally built garage was put up a few years before we bought the house. Apparently it wasn’t big enough, though, so the previous owners poured a two foot concrete pad extension on one side, cut one wall off, and moved it over. Then they just added boards to bridge the gap and shingled over it. The main door was replaced with a larger one and at the back (yard side) they put a smaller door, which may or may not have been the original front garage door. In any case, the structure was badly compromised, and by the time we bought it, water, rats, roaches, and plants were getting inside. We’ve used it as-is for the last few years, with big plans for a flat-roofed masonry garage and a yard-side fireplace waiting in the wings.

Roof removal

With our basement dig out pending and a giant pile of debris from the porch in the back yard, we needed to tear down the garage to make way for dumpsters. Sarah’s parents came down to lend a hand on Saturday. There was some doubt as to how long the process was going to take, but we had the whole thing down by mid afternoon.

Going…

Gone!

We wanted to get the yard closed off before calling it a day. We started work on the gate, but we only got one side up before it started getting late. By then dinner had arrived, so we propped up the other fence panels and called it a day. Sunday I broke down the garage pieces, we got the pad swept up, and I put together the rest of the fence and gate across the back.

Fence installation (also Derek)

The gate doesn’t work all that well at the moment. Because the new fence on the right doesn’t have very good footings and because I put in the posts with spikes instead of footings, the gate needs some center support to stay rigid. That in turn make it difficult to open and close. I may put a wheel on at least the left panel to make it easier to get the car in and out. When you open the right side gate, the fence leans enough that the neighbors side gate opens by itself. In any case, the garage is down and the first dumpster is on order for Friday, so now we need to get a path cleared in the yard!

Back Porch Demo

March 30, 2015 / Matt / 2 Comments

We want to dig out the basement, and the only door is at the back. To be able to get a dumpster into the back yard and haul loads of dirt straight out, we need to tear down the back porch and the garage. We’re planning to replace both anyway, so doing it now makes sense. The back porch is a fully enclosed, two-story, vinyl-siding-clad beast. We took out the stairs from the first floor to the second a while back so we could put in the back sliding door, so it just has steps down to the back door and to the basement.

The first step was to move all of our accumulated stuff off the porch, including the old radiators. Fortunately I found a used radiator company to come and take them and even pay me a bit for the trouble. I disconnected and removed all the old electrical and moved the phone line box from the outside of the porch to the outside of the house.

Windows and doors removed

Saturday morning I started work removing the doors and windows and was soon joined most of by Sarah’s family. We discovered that because the porch was enclosed after it was built, the walls weren’t integral to the structure. The walls consisted of some horizontal 2x4s attached to vertical beadboard, some of which was twenty feet long, and vinyl siding on top of that. While not very strong it held together remarkably well. The big challenge was the right side, where there was no landing or stairs to work from, just a big open space.

Walls coming down (with Mike and Matt L)

We managed to rip down the right side of the wall in one giant piece. You can see from this photo how the floor only extends to the door in the middle of the house. With that piece down, the rest of the back wall was pretty straightforward. The right side wall was a bit interesting. We wound up pulling the pieces of beadboard off individually and then the vinyl siding, which at that point was just hanging from itself.

Walls removed (with David and Matt L)

By that point is was evening and we wrapped up for the day. The next day we had a bunch of friends over to start working on the structure. The roof was an open question, since there wasn’t a great way to reach most of it. In hindsight, it may have been better to tear the porch down back when we took out the stairs, since having the landing would have made this process easier, plus we wouldn’t have had to worry about breaking the new sliding door with a piece of falling debris.

Roof removal

We used the ladders and a piece of fencing we bought to fill in the gap to shield the sliding door from the chunks of falling roof. We used a rope on the right column to pull it down after cutting it near the base with a chain saw. At first we tried the pictured system of pulleys to pull it down, but the angle was wrong so we wound up not using them. Unfortunately the porch beams were pocketed into the sheathing, so I have to go back and patch the holes in the outside wall before birds start nesting in the walls. I ordered an extension ladder as well, something that probably would have come in handy for this project, since the folding Werner ladders aren’t quite long enough.

Removing the last section of roof (with Dean, Matt B, and Drew)

We had a bit of a scare pulling down the last section of roof because the left column started to lean out, not only getting close to our power line, but pulling away from the beam that held up the second floor of the porch! After we got the roof section off things went quickly and we got the second floor structure removed. I also screwed the second floor door shut so we won’t have any accidents.

Finishing up (Dean and Matt B)

The first floor went pretty quickly too. We left the section by the stairs so we can still get in and out. We moved all of the drywall out of the garage and the freezer out of the basement and into the first floor, and then Dean and Matt built a new railing while I put up some house wrap over the sheathing and patched the lower two holes in the wall.

All done! (With Dean, Drew, and Hector)

We now have a massive pile of debris in the back yard (scroll back through the pictures to watch it grow). We’ll need to live with it until we get the garage torn down and a dumpster into the yard, but that should just be a few weeks. I plan to salvage some scrap material to build a ramp that we can use to get wheelbarrows of dirt into the dumpsters when we dig out the basement. This was a big two-day project and we couldn’t have done it without tons of help from family and friends.

A huge thanks go out to the Saturday crew: Mike, Lee, Matt L, Amy, Rob, Nicole, David, Collin, Dylan, and Dustin, as well as the Sunday crew: Dean, Hector, Drew, Anna, and Matt B. Thanks everyone!

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