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We are not finishing the basement


Airehead

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57 minutes ago, Kzoo said:

Yes you will

But we don't need the space.  Drywall was expensive and when did paint go up so much.  One more wall might be nice.

50 minutes ago, Longjohn said:

When you don’t do the ceiling I recommend a suspended ceiling to make it easy to get to plumbing and electrical that would be difficult with drywall.

Good advice which i would use if we planned to finish the basement.

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1 hour ago, maddmaxx said:

At the very least a good concrete paint.  If not it will always be dusty and when the walls sweat, smelly and perhaps moldy.

Seriously, do this.  Paint the ceiling black, throw an epxoy paint on the floor.  Then you can put up some drywall and you have the best of both worlds.  

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1 hour ago, maddmaxx said:

At the very least a good concrete paint.  If not it will always be dusty and when the walls sweat, smelly and perhaps moldy.

Interesting.  Einstein did this before we moved in. Basement has been bone dry so far. 

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My basement, originally my parents' basement. was originally just dirt floor with not enough room to stand up.

My parents apparently had just enough money to pay to have it dug down to a less than 7 foot ceiling and left 3 feet of dirt behind cinder blocks and a cement shelf-top that became a 3-foot wide shelf running all around the exterior walls except where the exterior door is.  The house's exterior foundation only comes down about 4 or 5 feet from ground level, but dad left a lot of space: he was a sign painter and often needed a lot of shelf space to store finished signs.

What takes out a lot of room is an 8' x 8' un-dug-to-3'-high space around the old chimney that included more shelf space.

I'd have had the chimney removed if I had known the new gas furnace and gas hot water heater in the basement didn't use the chimney: they're too high-efficiency and water vapor from the cool fumes would condense in the chimney and run back down into the heaters. The exhausts now run through polypropylene pipes and out the side of the house 1+ foot off the ground. The gas clothes dryer formerly in the basement is now located in a new closet off the kitchen, taking up a little back porch space ($3300 cost), on the 1st floor and it vents out the wall.

I may have the chimney removed in the future because the chimney runs up through the middle of the house.  The key thing is to pay to have the chimney and bricks removed from the roof and part of the 2nd floor and the roof repaired.  It's in a place where that should be an easy job.  I would then remove the rest of the bricks myself and dig out that 8' x 8' area and end up with a much bigger basement.

After I got out of college, I put four basement windows in - there were none before - and State Farm put even better ones in after the fire.

The exterior door and frame were rotting and falling apart before the fire.  State Farm and my contractor replaced it with an excellent, water-proof door and frame and I paid $7800 to have an exterior roof over the outside basement steps and the area around it.

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23 hours ago, Airehead said:

Interesting.  Einstein did this before we moved in. Basement has been bone dry so far. 

Unfortunately, mine was very wet.  I bought it during the driest year in about 20 and my inspection engineer didn't pick up on it.  We solved the problem when we finished the basement.   2 inch Styrofoam glued to the concrete with vertical glue runs.  Then footers and headers and studs inboard of the foam, then green wallboard.  Before any of this was done a trench was cut all around the basement filled with 4 inch pipe and crushed stone and capped with concrete with a 1/4 in gap against the outside wall for any rebar leakage to get to.

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16 minutes ago, maddmaxx said:

Unfortunately, mine was very wet.  I bought it during the driest year in about 20 and my inspection engineer didn't pick up on it.  We solved the problem when we finished the basement.   2 inch Styrofoam glued to the concrete with vertical glue runs.  Then footers and headers and studs inboard of the foam, then green wallboard.  Before any of this was done a trench was cut all around the basement filled with 4 inch pipe and crushed stone and capped with concrete with a 1/4 in gap against the outside wall for any rebar leakage to get to.

I’ve watched similar on This Old House. 
Not many basements out here. When we were in the market for our home, we looked at two that had finished basements. Both would have required upgrades we couldn’t afford at the time. 

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48 minutes ago, maddmaxx said:

Unfortunately, mine was very wet.  I bought it during the driest year in about 20 and my inspection engineer didn't pick up on it.  We solved the problem when we finished the basement.   2 inch Styrofoam glued to the concrete with vertical glue runs.  Then footers and headers and studs inboard of the foam, then green wallboard.  Before any of this was done a trench was cut all around the basement filled with 4 inch pipe and crushed stone and capped with concrete with a 1/4 in gap against the outside wall for any rebar leakage to get to.

Good plan.  We have one of those french drain systems just in case.  We have never seen any water in it at all.  Of course if we had skipped it, we would have a creek in the basement.

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1 hour ago, Airehead said:

Good plan.  We have one of those french drain systems just in case.  We have never seen any water in it at all.  Of course if we had skipped it, we would have a creek in the basement.

I live on a flat ledge on a hill and the problem turned out to be rock and hard clay about 3 feet down.  That acted as the surface water table for all the water coming down the hill underground or on the surface.  That meant that my foundation was a soup bowl dug into that and it filled with water about 24 hours after a heavy rain storm or in the spring after the surface thawed out.  It's almost surprising that my foundation doesn't float up and out of the ground.  Someone tried to fix it by pouring a second basement floor on top of the first one but that does nothing to prevent hydraulic pressure from forcing water into the inside.  The water had to be removed.  There was an existing sump pump hole in the basement which filled up in the spring the next year after I purchased the house.  The pumps had to run almost constantly.

My French drain system has a down slope run to an under road culvert that feeds a wetland that has drains of it's own.  This is with town permission but the run is 350 feet long and is 6" pvc. That makes it a passive system and I don't have to worry about power outages shutting down my sump pump.

One extremely wet spring I measured in a half assed way and found 180 gallons of water an hour coming out of my drain.  :o

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Wow

35 minutes ago, maddmaxx said:

I live on a flat ledge on a hill and the problem turned out to be rock and hard clay about 3 feet down.  That acted as the surface water table for all the water coming down the hill underground or on the surface.  That meant that my foundation was a soup bowl dug into that and it filled with water about 24 hours after a heavy rain storm or in the spring after the surface thawed out.  It's almost surprising that my foundation doesn't float up and out of the ground.  Someone tried to fix it by pouring a second basement floor on top of the first one but that does nothing to prevent hydraulic pressure from forcing water into the inside.  The water had to be removed.  There was an existing sump pump hole in the basement which filled up in the spring the next year after I purchased the house.  The pumps had to run almost constantly.

My French drain system has a down slope run to an under road culvert that feeds a wetland that has drains of it's own.  This is with town permission but the run is 350 feet long and is 6" pvc. That makes it a passive system and I don't have to worry about power outages shutting down my sump pump.

One extremely wet spring I measured in a half assed way and found 180 gallons of water an hour coming out of my drain.  :o

 

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