The Basement Renovation

When I moved into my first humble abode, it boasted a "finished" basement.  Well, perhaps "boasted" is the wrong word. The walls were wood paneling, the floor was commercial tile, and there was a suspended ceiling with fluorescent lights, but this basement was a far cry from the family room in the house where I grew up. Over the course of a few years, I challenged myself as a do-it-yourselfer and transformed the basement into a real living space.

The start of something big...

Original finished basement

The biggest obstacle was the placement of the furnace and hot water tank:  they were located in the middle of the basement.  The previous owner had built an "L" shaped partition to hide the furnace, but it was located too close to the furnace for my comfort.

My original plan was to simply throw some carpeting down, and maybe paint the paneling to brighten things up a bit.  The previous owner had a pool table in the basement, and, being single at the time, I figured that I would put the space to the same use.  As I looked more closely, I also saw the potential of finishing off one corner and creating a computer room.  It was when I tried to determine the placement of the partition wall that I realized that I had other problems to deal with.

Despite the fact that the home inspector did not report any sign of water damage, water damage clearly existed.  A stain on the wood paneling could have been the result of a leaking window, but further investigation revealed wide-spread moisture problems.

As I pulled one of the panels off the wall, the strapping came with it.  The strapping was partially rotted from excessive moisture.  I ended up gutting about three quarters of the basement, leaving only one paneled wall and a section of built-in closets and drawers in place.  

Between the strapping and the block foundation wall was roofing paper.  The wall behind the roofing paper was wet and mildewed.

stripping the strapping

Because there was no vapour barrier, warm moist air was coming in contact with the cold exterior wall.  Even though the block was covered with tar paper, the seams weren't sealed and air could get between the paper and the block.  Once it condensed, the moisture could not easily evaporate, and therefore the walls were pretty much in a state of permanent dampness.  The block had been coated with a paint-on moisture-proofing product, but it was no longer in very good shape.

Before a new product could be applied, the old moisture proofing had to be removed.  This took me about a week using a drill with a wire cup attachment.  It was a messy job, and by the time I was finished, there was an inch of dust over the entire basement.  My drill also literally "bit the dust" during this process.

Block walls stripped bare

Once the walls were clean, I was able to moisture-proof them with a product called Xypex, which bonds with the structure and crystallizes to fill the pores in the block. More information on moisture-proofing, can be found elsewhere on this site.

With the waterproofing done the basement was ready for framing.

A period of several months passed between the time that I took the strapping off the walls and applied the moisture-proofing.  During that time, I played around with a couple of different floor plan ideas.