March 12, 2009

Getting to the basement

Well! The day before I was supposed to cash my refund check, twenty-seven weeks after I ordered them, the shower doors showed up from Brooklyn Kitchens. And they look pretty good, we think. (Although the master bath has a leak at a seam, so a service call will be in order).
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/110124471
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/110124457
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/110124474

Downstairs bath here.
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/110124475

Meanwhile if you’ve been following along, you recall that the stairs to the second floor were too short, and didn’t completely make the platform. This was solved by putting a ‘box’ at the top of the stairs and pushing them forward.
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/110124473

As we come to an end, one of the biggest nightmares has been the amount of dust that just doesn’t stop. I’ve realized that the basement ceiling, sheet rocked in 1968 and with many holes, has been capturing dust and debris for decades, as well as new stuff from the renovation. We decided that whether or not we had the money to do some basement finishing, the ceiling had to go. This is a perfect project for a homeowner to do to save money; not difficult or technical, just dirty, dusty, and time consuming. But we got it all down and out in the space of a few weeks. Here’s the space with the ceiling as was.
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/110124481

I’ve taken a couple of shots of ceiling pieces as they came down, to show what was sitting on top of them. Nasty!
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/110124477
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/110124476

The worst spot was below where the old kitchen and bath were. The plumbing had leaked for years, the joists had to be replaced there, but they had tried to reinforce it by nailing boards under the plumbing and filling in with cindacrete. That was vile getting down.

Getting rid of the debris was timed to not call any attention to ourselves. Everything went into black plastic bags, but nothing too heavy. Two bags in front of our house, and two bags in front of a just-converted rental with no tenants a few doors down. One sometimes up the block mixed in with trash from a larger apt building. Twice a week for a few weeks and no problems.

We’ve now come to the point where we have to decide what to do about the basement. As avid readers and book collectors, our library is about three thousand volumes. In our previous coop, we had space for about half, and the balance was in a storage place, which is now up to $250 per month. Our plan was to turn half of the basement (500 sft or so) into a library, but only if that would not put books at risk. (The other half is boiler, storage, tools, etc.).

We are two blocks from the highest point in Brooklyn, and we have been here fifteen months without the slightest whiff of mold, mildew, sewage, or water. We have done calcium chloride tests on the concrete floor, and moisture tests on the walls (thx smokychimp for that suggestion). We seem to be as dry as can be. And frankly I’d be equally afraid to try and pack a library in an upper floor of a small house without reinforcing the floor.

At the same time, we are pretty broke after this reno. We asked our GC for a price to ‘rock walls and ceiling, and tile the floor as cheaply as possible. His price was $19,000. That was very discouraging as we really can’t swing that right now. We decided to see if we could do it ourselves, maybe with friends, maybe just stripping and painting the walls, so we asked for some advice about the walls.
http://www.brownstoner.com/forum/archives/2009/02/what_to_do_abou_4.php#comments

Thanks to that post, a contractor had an interesting suggestion, and we invited him over to take a look. To make a long story short, he quoted us less than half of what our GC did, which is manageable, and we retained him to start.

Please see
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/basement
for a series of pix on progress.

Naturally our GC was not happy, altho he didn’t express it. But he did say, yesterday, that his office person had made a mistake and that the 19k was for the WHOLE basement. The HALF that we wanted was 11k. He would have got the job for that, but, that’s not what we remember.

Posted by denton at 5:31 PM | Comments (8)

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