Basement Update



The finished job of cleaning out the northwest corner



The mess was half cleaned up before I remembered
to take the picture.



The last three weeks have been busy in between fighting a sinus infection.  I did get the northwest corner cleaned up and moved to the new shelving I put up in the northeast corner.  Before I could set up the shelving I need to cut down a pipe with old wiring in it.  I believe this wiring may have been where the original fuse box was located.  The pipe was cut off about 6 inches above the floor when they removed the old pipe and wiring.  I first tried a hack saw and then moved to use a jig saw to cut the pipe and final used a hammer to nock the partly sawed pipe off.  Using the hammer loosen the cement around the pipe so I mixed up just enough cement to fill in the area around the pipe and let it set a week before I could touch up the floor paint.

The wires were not live.

A week later I finished touching up the floor and could start setting up the shelving.  That Saturday, I stop by the local lumber yard and brought a ¾” sheet of plywood for the flooring of each shelf since it was cheaper to cut the flooring to size than to buy it precut.  The unit I brought you can buy the end shelves and the number of railing need for how many shelves you need and I decided on four shelves.  It took a day to move all the stuff and arrange it on the shelves.   I also moved the table and pulled the washer and dryer out from the wall.  Now, I finally have access to the remaining wall section that needs to be fixed.

The finished cut pipe.

On Saturday I starting removing the loose section of concrete with a scraper and finished removing loose paint and concrete with a wire brush attached to my electric drill.  The wire brushing is necessary but the cloud of dust in the basement is bad.  Before I started I stuffed towels in the crack between the basement door and first floor and also the doorway to the finished sewing room in the basement.  A dust mask (not the white fiber mask) is a must along with ear muffles and a face mask.  I can only take about an hour before I need to take a break and let the dust settled before the next round.  It took about 6 hours with all the breaks before the wall was done.  I spent all Sunday vacuuming and cleaning the layer of dust that I created on Saturday.  The worst part is now over and the remaining work on water proofing the basement should be easy.

Things are Moving Along in the Basement!

The floor along the east basement wall is now painted. I finished putting the fourth coat on the floor at 4:50 AM on Tuesday before going to work. Now I need to allow the paint to cure one week before I can set up my shelving.

Last night I started to move the jelly cabinet and other items so I can start to prepare a new section of the floor for paint. I noticed there is an area by the chimney which needs a coat of hydraulic cement before I can start painting it. So I will do that over Labor Day weekend and then I can paint it the following weekend. I cannot believe I might finally finish working on the east basement wall section this fall and I will be only six months late of my goal. I still will have the 2/3 of the north wall left to do and that is where the laundry tub, washer and dryer are located.

PS: I done painting the deck but need I want to put out the new furniture and put the hanging baskets up before I show it off.

Weekend Projects

I spend the weekend working on the painting the basement walls and I finished putting on the fourth coat of Watertite paint on Sunday.  The "aged pearl" color sure brightens the basement up.  I still have the small wall with the electrical panel and the northeast corner left to paint this summer.  I can start paint the wall with the electrical panel on Wednesday but the northeast corner needs to cure until Sunday before I can start paint it.

Once I finished painting the wall I can pull up the drop cloths and plastic and start preparing the floor for painting.

While waiting for the paint to dry in the basement, I spent Saturday afternoon hand sanding the railings on the right side of the picture. I thought I would be using my power detailer sander for this but the head was to large to fit in between the railing going down the stairs. It took me 6 hours to do that small area. I try to working on it Sunday when the deck is in the shade but wearing a dust mask in a Heat Advisory was just too much. The deck can just wait until the weather is cooler.

Finally I Am Back to Working on the House.

The garden is now in maintenance. So all I need to do there is pick the produce, water it, weaving the squash & cucumber vines in the trellis and tie up the tomatoes. I also stop selling plants at farmer's market the last weekend in June. This allows me an extra half day on the weekend to get other projects done at home the rest of the summer.

I took Tuesday and Wednesday off this week to get a good start on two projects to be done this summer. The first is to finish waterproofing the basement. The basement project was put to a halt late February when the paint in the upper southeast corner started dripping down the wall. See "Painting the Basement" more information. I spent the both mornings painting the wall, so now have 3 coats on the south wall and 2 on the east wall section. Watertite paint recommends 3 to 4 coats on cement wall. I plan to spend my weekend mornings down there painting on the last coats this coming weekend. I still need the paint the east section of the wall with the fuse box and water softener tank in front of it. I need to do some repair on those sections because my hydraulic cement failed to bond in some areas.

On my afternoons off this week I started to sand down the deck to the bare wood. I finished sanding any area I could get my 5" oscillating disc sander into by 7 PM on Thursday. All I need to do is use the detailed sander on the remainder of the deck and if necessary do some hand sanding before staining it. I pick out a Benjamin Moore semi-transparent stain called Dragon's Breath which nicely compliments the Brookline Beige on the clapboards. I would like to paint the deck railings similar the front porch. I would like to paint the spindles with the Brookline beige and the hand railing with the Tarrytown green but I am waiting until I see how the stain color looks on the deck floor. I hope to finish sanding the deck this weekend hopeful the 90F weather will hold off until Monday.

Painting the Basement

The weekend was again a putting one step forward and well maybe 3 steps backwards. Saturday I spent time in the northeast corner of the basement putting hydraulic cement over the areas I cleaned up last week. I had 2½ bucket of cement that was not enough to finish the job. Monday, I will buy two more buckets to finish the job next weekend.


Next I started cutting in the edges and covering the insulation with the paint. It looks much better if the insulation is the same color as the wall. I completely painted the unfinished section of the south wall; it stills needs another 3 coats to completely waterproof it.


The outside corners of the basement have had condensation or frost developing there when the temperature drops outside. The weather has been mild (for winter) most of the week and I been checking for water drops or frost all week and found none. So when I started to paint on Saturday, I assumed everything would be OK. The temperature dropped into the low teens last night and the water droplets started to form and drip down the wall. I was beside myself on how to stop it. I gave up and went to bed and found this in the morning.


I just wanted to curl up on the conch and vegetative all day but around 10 AM I figured out that if I used my heating gun to dry the paint I could keep the rest from dripping down the wall. I took a dry paint roller and rolled over the drip area to remove the drip marks at the top of the wall and started the heat gun. It worked and what was left dried and it warmed up around the upper 30’s to low 40’s so the condensation has not redeveloped. I wished I would have thought of this Saturday night, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. I will need to giving up painting until the night time temperatures are in the 40’s and that will not be until mid or late March.

I decide not to spend all Sunday on the conch instead I pull the turkey carcass from the freezer and made turkey soup, whole grain bread and Spicy Roasted Butternut Squash with Smoked Sweet Paprika. The Spicy Roasted Butternut Squash with Smoked Sweet Paprika is from KalynsKitchen.com, I used regular paprika but I can’t wait to try it with smoked paprika.

While doing all that cooking and baking I was trying to figure out what project I should work on next until I can go back to painting the basement. My first thought was to divide the closet in the front bedroom; this room is my sitting & TV room. I want to divide this closet so I can have a linen closet opening in to hallway next to the bathroom. Then I remember that I need to replace the screen in the screen frame for the back porch door. I also need to finish shellacking the bifold doors for my bedroom closet. The doors are one of many unfinished projects and this one is about 4 years old. Before Christmas, I was trying to finish off many of these projects before the family came for my brother's birthday in December. Since it will be awhile before I can paint, it is time to finish off a few more unfinished projects or as I call them UFO (unfinished objects).

Rewriting and Basement Update

The electrician finished looking over the wiring and fixed problem areas. He wired my bathroom exhaust fan, removed the 220 electric stove's outlet and replaced it with a 110 outlet by the stove. He added an outlet by the microwave, so I no longer have it on an extension. I asked him to replace the 2 plug outlets on both ends of the kitchen to 4 plug outlets. I could never get the back porch light to work; now it works. Last Christmas a received new fixture for the porch from my Dad and it looks great. Last thing I requested was an outside outlet near my gas grill so I would no longer have to run an extension through the porch window to run the rotisserie.


He never did find what was causing my TV screen to go black but the TV worked normal this weekend. My father, who is a retired electrician, said he may have tightened a connection when checking the house wiring and that may have corrected it. When I talked to him last Wednesday, I mentioned that I noticed condensation on the electrical pipe bring the outside line to the fuse box. When he opened it up, he found that there was no insulation place up the pipe. The warm house air was traveling up the pipe meeting the cold outside air causing the condensation. He remarked that in some cases the water drips back on to the circuit breakers. I had fiber glass lying around the basement from all the work I am doing and he used it to insulate the pipe.

I finished insulating the 7½ inch space between the sill and first floor in the unfinished basement section. Replacing the fiber glass with the foam board and spraying foam over the sill has cut down the heat loss in the basement. While working down in the basement I took sometime to clean out the dryer’s exhaust vent. I was reading that if your clothes are taking longer to dry than normal your vent may be clogged. I pulled the hose at the dryer’s connection on Saturday and it looked good. So I put it back together and assumed it was ok. But for some reason on Sunday, I went outside and lifted the vent cover and found lint completely covering the wire screening. This time I pulled the hose apart on both ends clean and vacuum everything. I will not be using the dryer until later this week so I will not know if this corrects the problems.

The weather been in the 30s and 40s since Saturday and so the thaw has begun. The repaired basement walls are holding up fairly well but I found some minor leaks. I applied more hydraulic cement over those areas and maybe I can start to paint the walls with waterproof paint next weekend.

It has been a while since I lasted put out a Post.

Well, what have I been doing these last two months? Beside the holiday stuff, I cut in a bathroom fan before the first snow fall and I am still waiting for the electrician to wire it in. I raked the roof four times between December 8 to December 28 because I was worried about ice dams forming from all the snow on it. We had a thaw on December 30 to 31 and the roof was fine but the gutter downspout near back porch froze solid and water was running on the outside so I spend 2-3 hours with a heat gun defrosting the downspout the day before the thaw.

I finely put back the shoe base molding; it was pulled off over 6 six years ago when I was refinishing the wood floors. Before I could lay the molding down, I filled the larger gaps between the floor and baseboard with foam insulation. Allowed the foam to dry, cut off the excess then applied a bead of caulk before nailing the molding it place. This has cut down on cold air drafts and made the house feel warmer.

I also finished a project I started last winter. Last winter I was working on the storm/screen door to the three season porch. I finished stripping, painting, and hanging the door last March but never got around to painting the storm window for it. I finished painting it in October and replaced the screen with the freshly painted storm window.

These last two weeks, I have been back in the basement working on another unfinished project waterproofing the basement. I started working on this last winter and wrote about it in "Moisture and Water Problems, Part 1 -3". I finished cleaning the exposed south basement wall and 3/4 of the east wall. I cleaned the areas with wire brushes attached to an electric drill. I put off a lot of loose cement. Here are some pictures of the cleaned walls.


Last Saturday, it took 6½ 10-lb buckets of hydraulic cement to fill all the holes in the prepared walls. Next I plan to buy 2" sheet of foam board insulation and cut it to size fill in between the studs above the fountain to the basement ceiling. I was using the spray foam but that been to messy, the foam would fall in on itself and on the floor. Using the solid foam board and filling in the cracks between the board and studs should work out better.

That is what I been doing on the house these last two months. I will try to be more current on my posting this year.

Moisture and Water Problems Part 3

As I said in part II my goals were to:
1. Paint the floor in the sewing room and in the unfinished basement with Watertite paint
2. Hang the drywall in the unfinished sewing room closet where the oil tank was. This involved waterproofing cement wall, insulate the wall with Styrofoam, hang drywall, and install a closet organizer.
3. Repair exposed cement walls and paint them with Watertite paint.

Here is what I completed over the winter.

I did get the floor painted in the sewing and craft room except for the floor space in the unfinished closet.

The unfinished closet is still in its unfinished glory to my chagrin. As you can see there is a lot of work to be done before I can drywall it.

Lastly there is the unfinished basement, this is largely undone except for half a wall along the south side and a small portion for the floor in front of it. I have three exposed basement walls that need cleaning, patching and painting.

My biggest problem in doing the work was the curing time required for each step. When I started I have no idea it would take so long. First I would wash the walls and floor with TSP and wait a week for the wall to dry with the dehumidifier turned on. Brush off loose cement and paint with a wire brush then chisel open cracks along the wall. After completing the wall preparation, I mixed up the hydraulic cement and fill in the cracks and holes. It takes a week for the hydraulic cement to cure before any painting can begin. The preparation time usually would take two to three weeks because I would keep finding new areas which needed more work. Then I could finally paint but after reading the direction for Watertite paint, I found they recommended at least three possibly four coats of paint. I found it took three coats for the floor and four coats for the walls. The walls required more paint because the surface was grainy and full of little pits. Once the painting was done you should at least wait a week before moving anything on the newly painted floor.

Another reason it has been taking soon long is the unfinished section is mainly storage. After reading many of your blogs I have seen many pictures of basements being cleaned up this winter, my basement does not look much different from those before pictures. I have been going through my storage area trying to reduce it but I think what is left are heirlooms and Christmas decorations, so I am not throwing these out. So it comes down to where can I find the space to move them, so I can work on the next wall section.

To sum it up the basement project is done until next winter because I need to start working on another unfinished project from last summer. What project is that, PAINTING THE HOUSE.

Moisture and Water Problems, Part 2

I may have solved the water problem but does not mean that the moisture problem is under control. I define moisture as humidity not standing water. I might not have water in the basement this year but my house has always been humid. Some people might be thinking the house is to air tight but this is a house build in the 1930’s and still has no insulation in the wall. When you touch the outside walls they are ice cold and you can feel the drafts coming out along the floor and baseboards. I would think there would be plenty of holes for the humid to escape. I will admit that I do need to put in a vent in the bathroom and kitchen. The bathroom is on this summer's To DO list but the kitchen will wait until I remodel it.

So what could be causing the moisture problem in the house and basement? After talking to a long time residents, I found out there are springs in the area and beside that there is a creek running through the property behind mind. So all the water draining through the ground passes the house and toward the creek and with the possibility of springs in the area the ground water is close to the surface. Here is a picture showing what happens, when we have a heavy down pour in back of my house. This happens at least three or four times during the year. Last year I saw a waterfall from the creek to the tree showing on the right side.



The walls in the unfinished basement have the paint popping off the wall from the water vapor passing through the walls. The areas are also having a white power building on the wall as show in the photo below. I started to clean the exposed cement wall with a wire brush to remove the loose cement, paint and mineral build up on the walls. I brought wire brushes that I can attach to my drill, it did a good job. After I removed all the loose material I covered area with hydraulic cement. Hopefully this will reinforce the wall and stop the moisture from traveling through the walls. Any cracks found in the foundation also were filled in with the hydraulic cement. After all that, the walls are covered with a waterproof paint.



My goal was to finish the basement over the winter but there are always delays and of over estimating what you are capable to get done. The complete to do list was:
1. Paint the floor in the sewing room and the unfinished section with Watertite paint
2. Finish drywall the closet in the sewing room where the oil tank was. This involved waterproofing cement wall, insulate the wall with Styrofoam, hang drywall, and install a closet organizer.
3. Repair exposed cement wall and paint them with Watertite paint.

The next post will show what I finished.

Moisture and Water Problems, Part I

The basement moisture and water has been a problem since I moved into the house. During the first winter spring melt in 2005, I found water in the carpet but it smelled like cat and I believed my cat was urinating there. So I turned on my dehumidifier and dried the area out after treating and cleaning it. Again in 2006, I thought carpet felt damp but was not sure and could not find where if any water was getting into the basement.

It was not until the winter 2007-2008 when we had 100.1 inches of snow that I did find the problem. The carpet was soaked and there was a low area under the carpet where the water was pooling. The carpet was also acting like a wick and pulling more water into the house. So I torn out the carpeting and threw it away except some of the padding which I use to keep cut worms from destroying my broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and eggplants. So now I finely could determine where the water was coming into the house. The finished part of the basement is the only area where water leaks into the basement. This area is my designated sewing and craft room. Once I torn out all the carpeting and moved the furniture to a dry area, I put on the heat and dehumidifier to dry the place out again. During the summer of 2008, I raised the ground level around the southwest corner of the house since then this area has been dry. I hoped my problems would be fixed.

Unfortunately, during the melt in 2009 I had more water leaking into the southwest side of the sewing room. It does get discouraging when you keep trying to fix the problem and the same problem just shows up in a new place. The source of the water is mostly likely from the snow piled around the front of the house. The snow piles were packed about 10 feet from the fountain. I starting looking around the fountain and found a low area on the southwest side filling up with water under the front porch. At the time I believe the snow was piled far enough to drain away from the house but obliviously they were not. I will need to fill in the low area under the porch but that will not be done until I get to stripping and painting the front of the house. At that time, I will need to remove and replace the lattice skirting around the porch, this will provide the needed access under the porch. For now, I decide the best way to keep the water from coming into the basement was to change how I piled up the snow. Last winter I piled the snow father away and downhill from the house. I made it through this spring melt without any water but this was just one winter. I will have to wait several more thaws before I believe the problem is over.

Sorry, there are no pictures. I was hoping to find some but my basement is a mess since all stuff is stacked up and right now it is impossible to find anything.