Terre Haute House Repair - Cellar (6)
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
Cellar window interior - 21st March 2010
Cellar window interior - 21st March 2010
Cellar window interior - 3rd April 2010
To finish off the interior of the basement windows two layers of fibreglass insulation was placed in them and then pieces of plywood cut to cover the opening and screwed into the walls. The insulation came from what was left over when the games room was rebuilt and the plywood came from pieces of the wallboarding that was removed when work on the basement was started.
One other place that needed patching was the old drain in the cellar floor. When the guys who did the waterproofing were working they 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.
The newly painted second basement walls showing the old basement floor paint - 3rd April 2010
The basement is split into two rooms. We decided to use a tan two part epoxy basement paint from Rustoleum. This paint takes 24 hours to dry and as the basement consists of two rooms we decided to paint the second room and also move the stairs inthe first room so we could paint under them.
The old flooring was a bit of a mess. The old paint was flaking and just looked horrible, if that wsn't bad enough the concrete floor isn't very level.. As it is a basement and we didn't fancy the job of refinishing the entire floor we decided just to paint on top of it as it was. After removing everything from the second basement room we used a belt sander to remove all the loose flakes of old paint. We then washed and let it dry it three times. Just before we started painting we vacuumed the entire floor.
The temorpary measure we used while the paint under the stairs was drying - 4th April 2010
Painted basement floor - 4th April 2010
Painted basement floor - 4th April 2010
It's not perfect I know, but much, much better than what it was before. A few weeks later we noticed that the floor isn't as hard wearing as we'd hoped. We managed to scratch it moving stuff around in the basement. Admittedly, no other paint would have stood up to what we dragged across it, but we really were hoping for a little better performance. Of course, it may have been the crappy surface it was laid on and/or improper preparation we did before we painted. We've decided that next time we do this we're going to use several coats of cheaper paint.
This page created 3rd April 2010, last modified 11th April 2010
