Terre Haute House Repair - Cellar (7)

Now the cellar floor - well, half of it anyway, it's time to put everything back where it belongs in the second room. We decided to buy some heavy duty steel shelving from Menards. A few years ago we'd bought some of this stuff for our spare room upstairs and we're really pleased with that. For the basement we bought 30" wide, two 6ft lengths and an 8ft length. We reused the boards from the old shelving as the shelves. Looking back we should have bought the 2 ft wide shelving as the actual shelves are 28" wide - wich means that if we ever replace the wood we have to waste most of a 8' x 4' sheet.

New cellar shelving - April 11th, 2010

Once this floor was dry it was time to move everything from the other basement room and paint that...

Painted basement floor - May 5th, 2010

At last the basement was almost finished - I've still got some electrics to tidy up.

Part of the second basement room - July 2nd, 2010
A lot of stuff in here but it's a lot better than when we started

The first basement room - 5th July, 2010
The best thing about the work we did was that we regained another room

The board on the bed is so that Patty can do her leg exercises properly following her knee replacement

Basement Sink

Another thing we wanted done was the installation of a sink and hot and cold running water. The plumber we used for some ofthe previous work said he'd have to requote us as it was an extra job, it meant breaing into old pipework etc. etc. I wasn't too keen on rehiring him anyway as I didn't think he'd made that good a job with the PEX. It didn't leak but it seems Terre Haute plumbers are unable to understand that I don't want a fucking spiderweb of pipework in my basement, so I hired someone else and guess what? I still ended up with with a job that was adequate but not exactly tidy. To be fair the plumbing is a mess with all sorts of different types of pipe - but it's only what their fellow tradesmen did! Anway on with the story...

We'd bought a plastic laundry sink years ago with the idea getting running water (and I don't mean flood water) in our basement.

The new pipework to the sink (running from center top to right) - September 12th, 2010

The new pipe threaded through the new PEX

One thing this plumber did do for us was to find a nice set of brass faucets for our sink, these are by Aquasouce model #0088634. If I had the money I'd get a plumbing company form Indianapolis or somewhere to rip all of our basement plumbing out and do it again properly and neatly.

On to my part of the job...

My original idea was to use the basement sump pump which was installed in July when the basement was waterproofed to carry the waste water away from the sink, then realized that I'd be dumping "grey" water into the yard. Not a very good idea! Luckily we had a couple of pumps equipped with a floating switches lying around and I thought I could rig something up to take the dirty water away to the breather pipe we've got in the basement.

I always keep old material from old jobs and had had enough to make the p-trap...

Cellar sink p-trap

I found an empty 5-gallon paint bucket with a tight-fitting lid which also had a gasket which I thought would be ideal for holding the pump...

The original bucket I'd thought of using to hold the pump

What I also needed were some fittings to attach a hose to the pump. All I needed was a 1-1/2" to 3/4" hose adapter and a check valve to stop waer draining back out of the hose into the bucket. I couldn't find anything like this in Terre Haute Menards, Lowe's, rural King etc.) so I contacted an online company called Plumbing Supply. I explained what I wanted and they emailed me with a list of the parts I needed which were a 1-1/2" x 3/4" Brass Bell Reducer ($22.85), a 3/4" MHT x 3/4" MIPS Brass Male Hose Fitting ($2.67) and a MHT x FHT Brass vacuum breaker ($3.49). They also offered plastic parts; 1-1/2" Female PVC Adapter ($0.71), 1-1/2 Spigot x  3/4" FIPS ($1.16), 3/4" MHT x  3/4" MIPS PVC Male Hose Fitting ($0.76) and the MHT x FHT Brass vacuum breaker ($3.49). I placed an order for the brass parts and they arrived a couple of days later.

The parts I ordered from Plumbing Supply

The assembled pump adapter parts

This page created 11th April 2010, last modified 24th September 2010