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.

The Warmth of a fireplace

Well we thought maybe since a few people had heard about our progress over the last weekend, we may as well post it up so the rest of the world can see it.

The big goal of our MLK weekend was to get our back-splash done. Originally, it was going to be and my wife doing the blunt of the work and struggling our way through it. Thankfully a sister once again volunteered her talents and was able to help on the back splash, and it looks pretty good if you ask me. (And it allowed me to work on projects I saw of higher importance)

It is your run of the mill earth tone square mosaic tile you can buy in sheets. But then we decided that would be too boring so we bought some accent tiles; expensive little buggers, and put those in to add just a little more depth to things.

Oh and just a side note, when you buy thin-set, double check if it is quick setting or not... kind of makes a big deal of things if you have to hurry.

So while those two were busy with the tile me and my sisters "Special Friend" worked on finishing the data wiring through the house. he did a great job and it looks really good and clean. If anyone needs this done I highly recommend that you call him to come and do it. So now we have hard line internet and Coax running to almost every room in the house.

I plan on building a cabinet door and surround to go around it and make it "outta sight outta mind" but still very accessible for people if something needed change in the future. I am also going to just make a piece of plywood that can cover the exposed wire around the panel box and be painted to match the walls.  This will clean up the messy look of the Main breaker box and the central data location.

Now for the big one, long story short; we have been watching our Craigslist for a fireplace over the last 3 months. Mainly because both our patio and basement are reasonably cold places and we wanted something that would match the decor and still be nice. Once we started looking into it. We were not able to do anything in the basement, for venting reasons and our chimney now used for the furnace vent. as for the patio, we would have to do quite the overhaul of a wall so that idea was kind of out.

We were at Menards the other day, and they had on sale an electric fireplace insert. It is made to be put in a place where you had a fireplace but have no interest in making a real fire. So we got it and brought it home, but we had no mantle to place it in or anything. We did have a lot of scrap wood, and an air nailer lying around :) We then spent a part of the night looking at fireplaces on the internet and taking design cues we liked from them.

I spent the next day grabbing all of the leftover 1 x 8's and 12's and cutting them to what I needed to make a base, Uprights and filler boards. I had leftover Crown from the kitchen and baseboard from the wall we took out and left over 2x3's for the framing from the basement studs. We did go and buy 3 pieces of 1/2" round... to finish the look, but for the most part that was all. I had to cut a large piece of plywood we had from the cabinets upstairs for the top of the mantle...we have yet to paint it, but looks pretty good. My wife liked it so much; it is apparently going to stay upstairs in use until the basement is finished.

The best part about it is it weighs less than 80 lbs, so when it is wanted in one room... it can go there. We do plan on putting some paint on it or something, we are just not sure as to what color we are going for. But we are always open to suggestions !

Basement continued

Again, fallen off of the bandwagon, I remember in the days of old (last

Sept/Oct) this thing was getting updated all of the time. Now we are just trying

 to keep up with our changes.

So where was I, Oh yeah; So once I have gotten all of the studs up and in place

with the help of a friend, I was able to get ready to move on to other things.

But before I could go too far, I had to get a fire-blocker up in place on the

stud walls. Basically a fire-blocker is just what it sounds like. As you stud a

basement wall, you see that there is some space b/t the stud wall and the block

wall due to the need to have a square wall.  That space can be dangerous in the

event of a fire. allowing a chute for fire to follow from the basement to your

upstairs.

The way that we prevent that is by installing small blocks of wood that cover

the cavity b/t the two walls. eliminating the strong updraft that can be created

by a fire. In some states it is code in others not. But I had some extra

trim board I pulled off of the wall that worked perfect for the job.

Wiring/Speakers

I was then able to get my wires run through the walls, sorry for the few

pictures, but i was just in a groove.  The important thing to remember are that  you want to keep the outlets in the basement a min of 12" off the floor, and that you also NEVER run electrical within 6-8 inches of either audio or data(cat-5 or Coax) because this will cause disruption in the signal.

I actually went ahead and ran the speaker wire close to the ceiling and the Cat-5 about 10 inches above my 12-2 wire but the only impossible place was when I had to pass under the panel box. (well you can't win them all) Also took the time to get the wires for the outlets run, and I plan on a majority of the basement outlets being on 1 circuit, just to keep things simple.

After I was able to get all of the wires run, I could then begin to do my least

favorite project... my dads is plumbing, mine is insulating. Nothing worse than

being covered in fiberglass insulation and having your entire body itch from

the small fibers.

Anyway, we decided that it would be worth it to insulate the basement to keep

that extra bit of warm and actually kill the sound echo a little bit. Nothing

fancy but what is necessary to have those creature comforts. As for what

insulation to use it is primarily up to the person and what you are insulating.

What is most important on insulation is the R value, it is on all bags of it,

displaying its R-Value (basically how many hours it takes to change the temp of

one side to the same temp of the other)

More explained:

http://www.ehow.com/about_6544360_insulation-values-explained.html

Then up went the Vapor barrier, it has some R-value to it, but not really. All

the vapor barrier is for is to keep moisture from condensing on the backside

of the sheet-rock. Also as for thickness of the plastic, its really at your

digression, I used 4 mil, but you can go anywhere from 2-10 mil then just

staple it up with a nailer or whatever will stick it to the studs long enough

to hold it until the sheet rock goes up!

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Last but not least, to really change the overall look of the basement, we get to put the Sheetrock up. It really went pretty smooth overall, other than i decided to put it up by my lonesome. Not very recommended, it is just useful to have that extra set of hands around to be able to help out with moving and cutting of the sheet-rock. I used some mold-resistant Sheetrock it is nearly the same price as a regular sheet, usually green or purple. Reasonable cost for piece of mind.

Our ceilings in the basement are fairly low, which you will get with an old house. So I had to cut about 12-14 inches off of every sheet... that always stinks when you have to take that much off. Also I made sure to leave at least 1/2"-3/4" inch above the floor of the concrete just to keep any moisture from getting on the rock.

And Over the weekend, we got our back-splash up, and a small "impulse" buy and good use of our scrap wood, you will just have to wait and see......

Basements 102 (Framing)

Now onto the more difficult of the tasks for the home DIY'er, Framing. This isn't for the faint of heart, and somthing that I would receomend finding a friend to help you out with.

Framing is the boards that go one the wall behind the sheetrock and what holds the wires, insualtion and house all together.  In the basement there are options to how much of an extent you want to go with it. When it comes to size of the studs and spacing there options.


For the studs (verticals) You can use a 2x2, 2x3, or 2x4;  if you choose to use a 2x2, you can secure them straight to the wall, with anchors, obviously anchors that go below the surface of the wood allowing you to secure the Sheetrock without interference. This method would also allow you to do without a sill (board running across the top or bottom) but not very well recommended. Otherwise you can create a standard 2x3 or 2x4 wall and secure them in place. As for the sill; in a basement it is always a good idea to use pressure treated wood for the sill that is on the floor. Pressure treated wood is water and mold resistant, not proof, just resistant. The bottom board is the one that is pressure treated see the difference?

On the spacing... there are two options 16" and 24" optimally, This means the space from edge to edge is 16"s or 24".  Really there is little advantage to doing a 24" spacing on studs; usually 24" is saved for garages and basements and that's it. It is less load bearing but the advantage is that if you have a very very large basement it will save you a couple of bucks. But when you think about it a 30 x10 room would require 65 studs on 16" spacing and 43 when on 24". So it does make a bit of a difference if cost is a big thing. The only big disadvantage is that if you 24" spacing, that means there is an extra 8" between studs and therefore the Sheetrock over it will be more likely to crack when force is put on it. So if you have small children or plan on them...  with there rough and tumble and pushing one another into the wall; 16" spacing may be worth the extra 40 dollars in studs.

I ended up using 2x3 for the reasons that they were a hair cheaper than 2x4's, give me an extra inch or two on the room and it is just enough to be able to fit a normal sized electrical box in the wall.

While or before getting in too deep with framing up, you need to have a layout. If it comes down to a big square room, then there is not much to do. If you have a dividing wall however,  you will need to lay it out before you put it up.  I used string and a sharpie to start with the layout of the dividing wall since you can't guarantee that any of the basement walls are level you have to do your best to get your wall straight and true.

If you are short a level, and all all you have is a pen and a tape measure... that's all you need. Measure on 1 board 3 feet and mark it then measure the other way at 90º and mark 4 feet. Once those are done, the distance in between should be 5 feet. if not. Adjust which ever wall is still movable and that will put it in square... this works vertically and horizontally.

I had to use this method to set up our closet that was to go into the office/ bedroom. This wall was to be dividing up the big room so we have a smaller room on one end. The only bad thing that made it difficult was that I had to work around a water shut off valve. My personal preference is that I can be able to turn a wrench on the pipe in the wall; nothing is more frustrating then a homeowner building something around an important pipe or wire that now has no access. So our closest is a little extra deep, but worth it if I ever need to be taking the water pipe apart.

That concludes Basements 102... but there is more to come (when I get more photos) and we can go over FireBlockers and Egress windows and touch on insulation.

Finishing basments 101

Hope everyone out there had a wonderful Christmas and New Years! Me and my wife got to spend time with family and friends and away from the chaos of the house remodel that is constantly a temptation to work on :).

After all of the business of the holidays we had a chance to work on the house some. My place of work was shut down over the span between Christmas and New-Years, so I had the most opportunity to work on the house. the last time you were updated, we were doing the tidbits of final touches upstairs. Since then we have jumped to the basement; there are a few big projects awaiting us (cutting 25' of sewer line from out of the floor) but we decided that we want to at least make some livable space in the basement.

You need to know some things before you begin to finish a basement because they will effect how it is done.

What kind of walls do you have?

What you are wanting to use it for?

How often you will be down there?

Do you want it to be warm or not?

Does your basement tend to flood?

We are planning on using our basement for entertainment and for a place to be away from upstairs and part of that room we want to convert into a small bedroom/ or office.

First before anything, you want to seal your walls, really almost regardless of if you have had water in your basement in the past or not this will prevent water from at least coming through the walls. There are many options out there for sealers but you should know your needs and not just buy one.

The brand that we ended up getting was called Watertite; we also looked at drylock, but the warranty on it was the difference b/t 10 years and lifetime. Another thing to consider is the amount of water that can be  and needs to be held back. the WaterTite had a rating of 34 PSI (which means that it can have 34 pounds of pressure per square inch on the wall from water and not leak) and Drylock had a rating of 10 PSI; usually car tires are filled at 30-40 PSI, so that gives you a good idea of how much force it can hold. It wasn't cheap however; close to 30 dollars a gallon, and covered an area of about 8 x 20 feet after 2-3 coats. Making sure that the grout lines (stuff in/bt blocks) were covered the best. so depending on the dampness of your basement walls will determine what you are after for sealer.

WaterTite By Rustoleum

DryLock By UGL

Here is a good article that walks you through more specifics:  Waterproof-Your-Basement

Once we had the walls sealed, we were able to start laying out stud walls and how we wanted our basement to work.

Caulking and Cupboards:

So a week or so ago, while me and my wife were sick, we conjured up enough energy to putz away at the house. Though we were sick, I decided that it was time to finish the caulking in the bathroom and also that we could maybe try to get the handles on the kitchen cabinets. we were having issues/getting sick of grabbing the doors by the bottom and fighting the drawers open for things.
With the caulk, I found a trick that works ok if you are not confident in your abilities to caulk. What can be done is that you grab a roll of painters tape and then put the tape along the bottom edge of where you want the caulk, and the repeat the same with the top. Like this:

Then caulk at the best of your abilities, then either take a piece of cardboard, or one of those 2 dollar "perfect caulk" tools and make a smooth caulk line. I would not recommend using your finger, it is messy and it creates a concave fill and sometimes wipes out more caulk than you want out.  Make sure as well that the paint is dry.. or you will be like us and repaint part of your project.

Quick trick to putting on cabinent handles:

I took a piece of plywood and nailed on some 3/4" square board on both sides in an "L" shape and then we decided where we would want the handles for the cabinets and then measured in on the jig and drilled two holes for the handles. we used a 5/32 drill bit for this even though it required a 3/16 for the machine screws explanation later.  On this part... MEASURE MEASURE MEASURE... you do not want to get this wrong because it will be on all of the doors.

So after I test fitted a handle on the jig and it lined up perfectly on the holes, it was time for the real deal. I used a C-clamp Vise grip and set the jig in place... and a good note; use a piece of scrap plywood on the back to keep the backside of the cabinet from blowing out.  We took our time and they all drilled out nicely.

after that we fitted the handles.. the screws were tight because of the smaller hole.. Then if the handle didn't line up nicely, we took a 3/16 bit and drilled it out a bit so we had some play with the screws.. worked out great.  We have gotten enough done upstairs... that I decided to start on the basement!!