Rebuilding/renovating the basement after the flood (still not bike related)

[Whiskerfish]

I feel for you. Taping and mudding is not in my skill set.

[Sidecar Bob]

Taping &c has gotten easier since I started watching a YouTuber called Vancouver Carpenter.
Untaping and de-mudding is also getting easier the more I do but I doubt it will ever feel fulfilling or fun

[Sidecar Bob]

I started cleaning out the drywall joints in the doll room but the wet sponge left marks on the ceiling tiles. One light in a 180 sq.ft. room has never been adequate (especially after dark) and I'd eventually need to remove most of the ceiling tiles to do that so I took them all down now. I've drilled the holes in the joists and found pieces of cable long enough (you can see them hanging down) but I need to get some octagon boxes before I can finish.
I also have the frost free hydrant but I had to order a 1" masonry bit so I can install it.

06 - Ceiling tiles down.JPG

When I cleaned out the drywall joints in the storage room I dripped wet plaster all over the fibreglass. It is dried out and will be OK but learning from that I decided I should fix the vapour barrier before I did the joints in the rest of the exterior walls. Note that I left it over the receptacles until the mess was done.

07 - Vapour barrier & fibreglass fixed.JPG

I can't remember if I mentioned the cutting table in the sewing room; Dad built it from available materials and it is too big to get through the door so it is still in there. When we stood it on end before so they could spray the bottom of it for mould while spraying everything else too it was obvious that the bottom edges of the plywood sides had water damage and would need work. I wanted to attach casters (I don't want anyone dragging it across a painted floor) and there were no good places for them either.
We turned it upside down so I could work on it

01 - Table (before).jpg

I thought I'd be able to glue the plywood back together and add reinforce them with something I could screw the casters to but when I could see those edges properly it was obvious that gluing the plywood back together wasn't going to do

02 - Damaged edges 1.jpg

03 - Damaged edges 2.jpg

[Sidecar Bob]

I cut away the damaged parts flush with the supports for the lower drawers and everything else an inch or so below that. Yes, I did use all of those saws and the sander and that's what I removed piled on the right.

04 - Damage removed.jpg

This is a work table, not fine furniture so I used what I had on hand to rebuild it, namely the straightest stud grade 2x4s I had. The corners are mitred, then joined with glue and #14 x 3" screws through each joint in both directions. I used #8 x 2" screws through the drawer supports and more glue to attach the frame and the "centre beam" and located the casters so their base plates have two #14 screws ion either side of the mitre like mending plates. All in all it should be stronger than it ever was.
I used an ancient can of Pratt & Lambert Vitralite Black-Eggshell to paint it. The Internet will tell you that 15 years is the absolute longest that oil based paint will keep but this can wasn't exactly new when I inherited it 25 years ago and Dad wasn't exactly fussy about cleaning the rims & lids before he closed cans of paint (I opened a few cans to find a solid lump in the bottom) and it worked just fine. I should probably decant it to a glass jar but that old label is so neat......

05 - 2x4 support + paint.jpg

After letting it cure for a day I screwed the casters on and turned it upright. Kay is pleased that it is only about an inch higher than before and still a good height for working on.

06 - Finished (front).jpg

07 - Finished (rear).jpg

The drawers are all tight from being over stuffed with fabric pieces for years and I'll need to re-attach the veneer around the edge of the top in a few places but those can wait until the basement is finished and at least I can move it out of the way when I work in there.
BTW, I bought another set of those casters to install on the pool table when I get to the rec room.

[CYBORG]

looks good

[Whiskerfish]

Nice save on that cabinet.

[Sidecar Bob]

Thanks.

To install the new frost free hydrant I needed to drill a 1" hole in the wall. But I didn't have a 1" masonry bit so I had to spend more to buy one than the hydrant cost. And then I only needed to use it for a couple of minutes.
The pipes to the kitchen sink made connecting it pretty straightforward

08 - Plumbing for frost free.jpg

Right over the window isn't the ideal location but the kitchen sink is in front of a window that is right above this one so that's where the pipes are.

09 - Frost free hydrant.jpg

I put the fibreglass & vapour barrier back in the east storage room and put the rest of the drywall in there and the doll room, then pre-filled the gaps with Sheetrock 90 (I'm not good enough to use real quick setting mud).
That's as far as I can go in the storage room until I get a door and frame it (the pool room had an open arch).


After watching this video I ordered a TapeBuddy and used it for the first time while taping the doll room. It worked quite nicely and the tape is on with just enough (thinned for taping) mud under it to stick it on. By the time I have 3 coats over that it will be well & truly embedded.



This afternoon I put coat 1 over the tape in the doll room and then sanded the "platforms" (= remnants of the raised floor) under the benches in the shop to get them ready for paint.

[Sidecar Bob]

Shortly after my last post Kay & I left for the Re-Store to look for a door. They have decent used slab doors similar to the rest of the ones for the basement for about $30-35 so I planned to get one but I found this really nice brand new 34 x 79" bifold for only $25 and the rough opening is about 36.25" so I grabbed it instead.

08 - New bifold door.jpg

After looking at the prices of door frame kits and how the rest of the door frames were made I decided to make my own. Then I looked at the prices of 1x6 lumber. And discovered something on Rona's website called "select grade" that I'd never heard of before. Apparently select structural grade is similar to regular structural wood but with less knots, blemishes &c so when I was in Rona I asked what they were like and he took me in the back to look.
I have to frame 2 doorways (east storage and new closet) and they will be painted so I can use filler so I bought half a dozen of them.

I expected to have to cut the door down to fit the opening so once the doorway was framed I separated the halves of the door, rolled the radial arm saw out in front of the garage and removed 1.5" from the bottom of each. Since they are hollow I salvaged the bottom frame pieces, cleaned the residue & glue off with a card scraper and glued them back in

09 - Bottoms glued back in.jpg

After the glue dried I installed the hardware and hung the door. It came out pretty nice considering I haven't hung any kind of door in decades.

10 - Storage door hung .jpg

From the rec room (the casings are just tacked on for now to see what it will look like)

11 - Storage door from rec room.jpg

Of course, I'll have to remove the door to fill & paint the frame but right now I hear the TapeBuddy calling me.......

[Sidecar Bob]

After I taped the storage room I started on the door for the new closet at the end of the hallway. My Dad decorated this one for their old house and I've always liked it but there was no place for it here. Until now.

12 - Hall closet door hung.JPG

And from inside the closet (it will have shelves but no drywall).

13 - Hall closet doorframe.JPG

I got the first coat of mud over the tape in the storage room too.

[Sidecar Bob]

Another thing about the floor being 2" lower is that the bottoms of the doors are all going to be farther from the floor. My solution is to screw & glue a piece of 1x2 to the bottom; The gap will be a bit bigger than before but it should be acceptable.
Here's the bathroom door ready to re-install (I'll paint the doors after everything else is done)

06 - Bathroom door with 2x2.jpg

Here's what the toilet looked like on the remnant of the old floor. You can see why it made more sense to build a whole new platform than to try to re-use that remnant.

07 - Toilet (old floor).jpg

I've been putting off working on that because I wanted to cover it with left over LVP flooring but that would need some sort of edging to cover the raw edges and I couldn't find anything suitable.
I was searching online for something suitable the other day when I remembered seeing ceramic tile at the ReStore when I was getting the bifold door. Hmmmmm....... That could work.
So daughter Chris & I went out for errands the other day and I invested a few $. A very few $. I love the Habitat ReStore
And a day later the toilet was sitting in the new closet and the bathroom looked like this

08 - Toilet & old floor removed.jpg

The flange will have to sit on top of the tiles so the platform needs to be somewhat thinner than the old floor. It worked out that two layers of 1/2" plywood on top of 1x2s is perfect. It also needed to be split to go around the drain pipe so I dug out some offcuts of 1/2" and came up with two 2 piece layers with their joints offset so that they overlap. The tiles fit snugly under the flange

09 - Platform for toilet.jpg

[Sidecar Bob]

I got the tiles on on Saturday. We had a family thing Sunday so I got ready to grout it yesterday (Monday) and realized that I didn't have enough grout for the job. Since wedon't expect to be doing any more tile in the near future we went back to the ReStore today and I bought a part bag of grout.

10 - Platform tiled.jpg

I've also started working on filling nail holes and saw scores in the shop floor in prep for painting but I'll have to give the garden a few days so it may be a few days before I can start painting.

[Sidecar Bob]

The guys who removed the old raised floor used a circular saw to cut it up. Ideally they would have set the saw to leave less than a mm of the 2x2s but unfortunately the 2x2s weren't consistent enough for that so the saw blade scored the concrete floor in a lot of places.

08 - Saw grooves in floor.jpg

As well, Dad tried to nail the 2x2s to the concrete; A few of his nails went into the concrete and held but most of them just chipped the concrete and left holes, some up to 2" across.
I needed to fill the scores & holes so I searched online and found a product called Dap Ready-To-Use Concrete Patch, hoping that it I could just trowel it into the spaces and it would dry ready for paint. But nothing is ever as easy as it sounds. It is a latex-based compound with fibre reinforcement with a consistency like a mixture of cement and white glue, which means that no matter how careful I am I can't get it just in the hole or score and it seems to expand slightly as it cures so even if I scrape the floor clean next to what I'm filling there is a layer about a mm thick wherever I got it on the floor. I tried slicing the excess off with a razor blade but in the end a random orbit sander with 60 grit seems to work best.
Except that my ROS hasn't worked well in a long time and it finally died. More shopping online found a Metabo sander at Princess Auto for 2/3 the price of anywhere else and Kay was able to pick one up on her weekly trio to her Mum's.
We all know that the dust bags that come with these things are never much good so it had to be connected to the big shop vac. But the only hose I had for my ancient ShopVacs was only 6' long, not to mention a bit stiff from age (aren't we all?) so I bought a new 3M one. That isn't a direct fit. Apparently the 2-1/2" inlet ports in current production machines is about 2mm larger than the ones in machines made half a century ago. After messing around for over an hour I got the fitting off of the new hose and pushed the end of the old small hose into the new one, giving me 16 ft of hose. Then I found that none of the adapters that came with the sander are the same size as standard vacuum cleaner fittings. In the end I found a plastic pill bottle with an ID that fits the hose perfectly and an OD close enough that a couple of wraps of Gorilla tape made it fit one of the sander's fittings.
I could probably have sanded it to where the material in the grooves & holes was all that was left but I wore out 10 sanding discs getting it this good....

09 - Grooves filled & sanded.jpg

10 - Ready to paint.jpg

So with that done I was finally able to paint the shop and bathroom floors. The label says a 3.6L (mini gallon?) can should cover 480-560 sq.ft but I used virtually all of it on about 260 sq.ft. The wood platforms seemed to use more than a similar area of concrete so I think I'm going to plan on about 300 sq.ft of concrete floor per can, at least until I get another room's painted to confirm.
I won't be able to examine it closely until tomorrow but I think the shop floor looks pretty good. The bathroom floor will need another coat but I can finish putting the room back together and add coat #2 when I can get another can.

11 - Floor painted.jpg

Oh, and the foundation guy arrived yesterday morning. He has finished the 2 holes that had to be dug by hand and his digger is sitting on our driveway ready for tomorrow.

[Whiskerfish]

Floor looks good.
I am starting to get the itch. After the Holidays I will be resuming work on my sun porch/master bath conversion. I plan to contract the removal of the large windows and boarding up of the outside. That way I can get a jump start on the inside. There will be 2 small windows and a mini Split HVAC system so I probably need to order those soon.

[Sidecar Bob]

Thanks. It really does brighten the room, doesn't it?

I worked on re-installing the 1x2 shelves under the workbenches yesterday (Wednesday) while this was going on outside. In each hole he wire brushed the wall clean, coated it with fresh tar and applied Blueskin membrane with a dimpled product screwed on over that before filling it back in. By the end of the day he had dug 5 holes and the job was finished.

06 - Repair in progress.jpg

[Sidecar Bob]

It has come to our attention that we should be thinking about getting the snow tires put on the car but they are under the shelf in the garage, behind the stack of cabinets that I filled mostly with shop stuff so I need to move those cabinets back downstairs ASAP (they can sit in the train room until I put casters under them and move them around). So while he was digging I put the 1x2 shelves back under the benches and started moving things back to the shop.
The work table that sits in the middle of the shop tends to move around a bit so I drilled its legs for casters before putting it back together so it won't scratch the floor.

12 - Shop Nov 2 (work table, shelves).jpg

After that I moved the electronics bench back into place and screwed it to the wall about 3" to the left of its original location so that the shelf that the computer sits on won't block the closet doorway. I don't know when I'll get back to working on electronic projects at it but at least I can sit stuff on it while I work on the basement.
There's a lot more to move back in but it is starting to feel like my shop again

13 - Shop Nov 2 (electronics bench, computer).JPG

The cheapest baseboard I could find is 1/2 x 3-1/4 MDF colonial style in bundles of 10 (which makes the 1/4 x 2-7/8 FJ pine that the builder used upstairs look really cheap). That should be fine in most of the basement where the drywall ends about 3/4 to 1 inch above the floor but the "panelling" (actually reclaimed laminate flooring) in the bathroom now ends a bit over 2" from the floor and I didn't think that would support it well so I bought two 8' lengths of 1/2 x 5.25" baseboard. I cut them carefully and the offcut is about 4" long
Once the baseboard was on I re-installed the toilet

11 - Toilet installed.JPG

And then the vanity cabinet. I would have connected the sink too except that I need to shorten the drain pipe and I bought a 1-1/4" coupler instead of a 1-1/2 so we'll have to wash our hands in the kitchenette until I get to a hardware store.

12 - Vanity in.jpg

I also ordered some flexible trim to put around the base of the shower stall and I need to do a bit more caulking (and the 2nd coat of floor paint) but it's close enough to done that I moved the set of drawers in too and even re-hung the door

13 - Bathroom door.jpg