Terre Haute House Repair - Cellar (5)

Now that most ofthe major changes have been done to the basement in October 2009, we started filling in the holes in the walls and floor ready for painting. We used a polyimerized cement sand mortar mix for this as most of the holes were shallow and this type of mortar can be used to fill shallow holes without cracking.

Patched Cellar Wall - October 14th, 2009

The idea behind this patching is not to make the walls perfectly smooth but to simply fill any holes ready for painting. We buy cheap mis-mixed paint and had a couple of gallons of off-white which we used as a new undercoat then a coat of white semi-gloss as a topcoat. Most ofthe paint was sprayed on - probably the only interior walls I'd want to spray. I don't know what newer spray guns are like but spraying, no matter what the adverts say, is just too messy.

The newly painted cellar walls - 31st October 2009

One other place that needed patching was the old drain in the cellar floor. When the guys who did the waterproofing were workingthey put a compressable rubber bung into the old floor drain and put a shallow layer of concrete over it. It rained quite heavily and no water was seeping through this so I decided to try and level the floor.

The old cellar drain

The patched and levelled cellar drain - October 14th, 2009

I used the same mortar mix that I used for the walls. The actual drain hole was only about 6" in diameter but I ended up patching an area 3.5 feet by 2.5 feet in area and about 2" deep in the center, feathering out to next to nothing at the edges. Of course, the whole area was brushed with a wire brushed, dusted and then dampened with water before applying the mortar.

Another area that needed tidying was the old basement windows. Around 25 years ago someone had jammed boards intothe outside of the window openings then put a couple of layers of insulation into the inside openings. Neither had been fixed in any way.

One of the original basement windows - October 14th, 2009

What I did was to remove the old insulation and the broken pieces of glass that was behind them

Stripped cellar window

Some of the old cellar window insulation
In part of the old insulation I found a long abandoned wasp nest!

What I did was drill holes through the outside boarding then use 4.5" bolts to secure them to battens place across the inside of the old window frames. Before placing the boards back in place I ran a bead of silicon sealer around the outside of the window frames. Hopefully the boards are now more weatherproof and scure.

The secured window boarding - October 31st, 2009

At some time or other someone had used a lot of concrete in the window cills and some of them have the off-run as seen in the bottom of this image.

The outside basement window boarding

This page created 14th October 2009, last modified 1st November 2009