So over the last few weeks we have been changing up our basement and planning out the rest of it. This includes the bathroom laundry and the extra bedroom/office (not sure what we are going to call it) In the meantime we did some finalizing of the big room in the basement, and it has come- along pretty far.

After getting all of the sheetrock up and the mess of a sewer line project we did the week before; we were now able to move things out of this room for hopefully the last time. These Items were the little tidbits of supplies we have left for the remaining rooms in the basement and some odds and ends in which we don’t know where to put them. The Room was cleared, swept about 4 times and touched up some with paint. We took one of our 3 free rolls of carpet and dusted it off and laid it out on the floor.  The one nice thing about carpet is that it has the seams in it on the bottom so when you take a sharp knife you can actually cut your carpet pretty square.  Two things one must not forget, 1) always cut over a board 2) you can always cut carpet smaller, but never bigger…

Most times when you lay carpet it has padding underneath for softness; and tack strips on the edges that hold it when it is stretched and placed. In a basement, usually these things aren’t necessary.  I guess padding is up to you, but most basements that have any chance of moisture don’t have these as a precaution so that’s one less cost lost if you get any water down there.  As well as if padding gets wet, it smells moldy and soggy and can be more trouble than it is worth.

The way I have done it in the past, is you can hold the carpet down in a couple of ways, they make a carpet tape…that you put on the backside and stick it to the floor. Or you can just use duct tape and make it a giant loop to make it sticky on both sides, and then just stick it down. This is useful if you are forced to use two pieces of carpet because the one piece is not large enough.

The way that we chose to hold it down was we went and bought ¾” primed baseboard, painted it white then just placed it on top of the carpet and pushed down just a little to put pressure on the edges then nailed it to the wall.  We could have measured from the ceiling down and that it be the same height around the room, but if your basement is like ours.. it all slopes so there is no point in trying too hard for us, we just placed and nailed it.

The other part of this room that I enjoyed doing was what I called “the media closet” This is where I made a place in our closet in that room for the DVD player, My Xbox and My DVR… and then I have the TV on the wall in the middle of the room with no boxes and wire floating all over it… makes for a cleaner look. But that did mean I had to cough up a bit for some 25’ RCA and VGA cable… but worth it in the end.

The other bits of the basement have come together; we gutted the wall between the laundry room and frames all of it in after dry-locking the wall. I had to build the framing in 4-6 foot sections, since I was unable to transport a full 9’6” wall through the basement and into the bathroom. All of this while working around a vanity which has nowhere else to go. At the end of the day though we had that all framed up and ready for plumbing-electrical and insulation and drywall…

We are kind of at a pick and choose point of our project, picking the things we want to do and ignoring the things we don’t….. I really don’t suggest this method because now it seems we have 3 unfinished projects.. ugh.

Stinkin Sewer Pipe

And we are back, It has been a week or since we have laid the lowdown of what’s going on with the house.  The big project finally got underway. For those of you not in the “know” the big project was replacing sewer line and making a sump-hole. We have a bathroom upstairs, but we were lacking in the basement one, having a toilet in one far room and a stand-up single stall shower in another. Wasn’t a really functional bathroom at all, also considering there were no doors on anything in the basement so you could kiss privacy goodbye.

Now to start this project, you at least want to have a rough Idea of what you want. We knew what we were after, which was to remove the toilet, have a pipe straight into the sewer line for the laundry sink and wash machine, and locate spots for a toilet/sink/and shower in the other corner of the house.

We rented a Jack hammer, because it was much less messy than a wet saw to cut through the concrete, ran us about 70 bucks for a 24 hr period. This was for a 60lb 100v jackhammer, plenty for up to 4-5” concrete.  Then we set to work on the basement, we had three rooms to go through each needing the concrete broke up above where we would put the new pipe and to remove to old pipe that was in the way.

Fortunately, we found that the 70 year old concrete was actually only 3” thick which turned to make the job very very easy for taking the concrete out. It was better to make large chunks so it was easier to take out and up the stairs. We were going to lay 3” sewer line in the floor so to make it easy we took at least a 12” wide path out so we had room to dig and to maneuver. Be aware however when using a Jackhammer, the pipe that is below may be cast and brittle so unless you mean to break off the pipe try not to use a jackhammer directly on it.

Once we were able to start digging for pipe we did, but it is crucial to not take more dirt out than you need to, because otherwise you really have to pack the underlying dirt down before you lay your new sewer pipe to avoid settling… the last thing you want is a sewer line that settles….

On the far end of the house, where the sewer line goes under the wall and out toward the street, we first took a 3” line and shoved it as far as we could in so that in the future there would be good new plastic pipe available if we needed to replace any pipe from the house to the street. But as we did this we made sure that we did not shove to far as to hit a elbow where the sewer line dropped down, so going out 3 feet from the wall of the house usually would suffice.

Once we had all of the old concrete and pipe out, we could begin to lay pipe, This should be done with someone whom has done it before, it is a critical task that the pipe slopes just enough but not too much. They make a special level if you feel like finding one, just for you to be able to see the slope per foot on the pipe.

We worked along the basement, one person jack-hammering, one digging, and one laying pipe, and then as one would finish they would go back and help the person following them up; this helped us move along swiftly.  We went along, installing clean-outs (place for a plumber to run a snake in event of a clogged pipe)

After a time of running 2” pipe for the washing machine and laundry sink drains and also for a branch to the upstairs kitchen and the soon to be a shower in the basement we then were able to refill the trench in which we had made for the pipe.  We used the fine fill dirt, for it would fill into the smaller cracks and crevasses much better than chunks of concrete. When the dirt had been filled into the trench, we packed it down as much as possible using our feet and a sledgehammer to pack it down, leaving 3” for the new cement that we were to put in.

The cement was a bit of a challenge that we were mixing 1 bag at a time and each bag did not seem to go very far in filling the remainder of the top of the trench. We also made time to have a low spot for the drain that we set in the laundry rooms and made sure that as we poured the cement, that it was all sloping downhill to what had previously been the lowest point in the basement, trying to maintain that same positioning.

Just a general FYI, Sack-crete varies in types you may buy, the type we got was Quickcrete 5000, and then ran short on and got  quickcrete gravel cement mix. I really preferred the 5000 over the gravel, it seemed to trowel out much better than the gravel based. But once it all dried it was difficult to tell where one type ended and another started.

Once we were done, I was able to spend an entire afternoon scrubbing the stairs and the floor.  This process makes a incredibly large mess of anything in the area of the sewer pipe but to have it done means that we can now move on and finish the rest of out basement without having to wait on the new plumbing to be done.

We did about 40 feet of sewer line it was about 200 dollars in pipe and connectors, 70 for the jackhammer and 3 men for 8 hrs of labor.  Thankfully it was family so they were willing to help and we had to feed them and that was it, but we figured contracted out this would have been close to at least 1000.00 to hire. So this is one instant where the DIY and the mess are well worth it.