It's been a while!

It's been some time and that's because the projects have been small and quick so I didn't think it was a good time to document them. About two weeks ago we had a power outage that caused our sub pump to turn off. As you can expect, the finished basement flooded with 6+ inches of water. I didn't renovate the basement at all, just a little paint and curtains and called it a day. Well thank you water damage, I have to completely gut the basement for many reasons.

1) Water damaged the laminate wood flooring. Easy enough to fix right? Wrong. Under that flooring was just a simple foam padding and under that some PLYWOOD. Now if you know anything about cement, you know that it can hold moisture. Moisture against wood is like leaving a sponge under the floor. The plywood has to come up, the mold has to be removed and a vapor barrier will need to be installed.

2) I didn't want to redo the whole walls because it was fine. I was going to remove about 2 feet from the floor and repair it but that would've been too easy. I removed a 2 foot by 4-foot section to discover that the framing wasn't to code. I couldn't leave the walls this way because each stud was about 30" apart. It was also made of wood. again... rotted and susceptible to mold. I will be replacing them with metal studs. The walls were also standard sheetrock and not mold/ moisture resistant. Why!?? It's a basement that is naturally humid.

It's going to be a busy time but at least I'll have new things to post. I took the week off my day job to fix the problem. It's going to take longer since I have a flood restoration company coming to dry out the floor before I can restore things back to its original state but I can get a head start on some of the problems.


Top left image is before we moved in and the others were after. I didn't do much since it suited our needs but I'll post an image of the disaster area.