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Hey all:

I’m looking ahead to being finished with the rest of the house and I want to improve the basement with a view to creating a couple of rooms down there.

Unfortunately I’m pretty tapped out and don’t want to spend the 20k my GC has quoted to frame out and ‘rock the area, so I’m thinking of improving things on the cheap.

What I’d like to do is to semi-strip, seal, and paint the existing walls so they look better. You can see signs of past water incursion but I think that was from leaky windows; as you can see I’ve already installed new ones. In the past year since we bought the house the basement gas been completely dry.

I’m wondering the best way to handle the walls. I could rent a machine and powerwash, or I could scrape off the loose stuff and hope for the best. I’m also wondering if the paint has lead.

Anyone ever dealt with this before? Did you strip and seal, just strip and paint? What paint would you use? Sealer?