In Which The Basement Loses A Few Walls and Some Carpet

The Dream

Before I get into the demolition pictures, I want to expand on why we're doing all this work in the first place. When we were shopping for houses, one of my non-negotiable criteria was a space that I could turn into a workshop. Primarily, I wanted to be able to spend more time woodworking and build a collection of larger stationary tools. I also have had this electric car project on hold since 2013, so a space to do some welding and automotive work was highly desirable. Based on the houses we were seriously considering, it could have been in the form of a yet-to-be-built 1000+ sqft pole barn on 2 flat acres, a 1000+ sqft daylight basement/wet bar/home-theater/bedroom, or a dark and partially finished basement with humidity problems and a funky odor. Guess which one I ended up with.

What You See is What You Get (or not)

 

I've already shown some pictures and work that's been done in the basement here and here, but I haven't really provided a real tour of the basement as-purchased. At about 660 sqft (including the stairs, appliances, closets, etc.) with 6-7' ceilings, it isn't the roomiest workshop space ever. Luckily, I am short enough that the ceilings don't feel oppressive (just inconvenient and damage prone) and the metal working equipment will remain in the garage for obvious reasons. The biggest limitation to any basement workshop is access: without any external doors, the only way in or out of the basement is a tight little stairwell that makes a 90 degree turn and has less than 6' of vertical clearance. At some point, I will have to turn one of the old jalousie windows into a lumber loading chute, but as it stands, none of the windows are usable for egress. Technically, the finished half of the basement was used as a bedroom, but modern code requires a basement egress well for bedrooms below grade so now it is a "bonus room".

 
In all fairness, the finished half, while not livable, has some nice features. There are a dozen 3000 kelvin 16.5W LED cans that  almost make you forget you're in a basement. The crazy thing is that they are hooked up to a very expensive (and very very heavy) variac-style 1800W transformer for flicker-free dimming. My suspicion is that when the basement was finished, the widow had one of these in the back room of her hardware store and decided to throw it in. I can't imagine any other reason why someone would install a $2000 dimmer unless they really hated money. (Just for reference, the current LED cans have a gross load < 200W, can you say overkill?)

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The unfinished half of the basement is an entirely different story: between the painted concrete floors, efflorescent walls, buzzy florescent tubes, sketchy asbestos-look-alike ceiling tiles, sketchy built in closets and shelves (lead paint anyone?), and the boarded up windows, the nicest thing I can say is that it wasn't a nice place to be. Honestly, the pictures look so much better than actually being down there.

How about this sketchy dryer vent hookup! Don't try this at home kids: when we demoed the basement ceiling, I took this apart and found it nearly completely filled with lint, making it one heck of a fire hazard. Also, guess what's in that black pipe it's tied to... yeah, that's right, natural gas.

This rat's nest is the old telephone and (older) security system hookup.

I Really, Really Hate Carpet

One of the things I really hate is wall-to-wall carpeting. I don't care where or why, I will never like the stuff in a residential setting. I would actually consider sheet vinyl before carpet in most circumstances, and in a basement with clear moisture problems? No question, carpet is about the single worst choice possible. Too bad the previous owners never got the memo: in the three years they lived here, they replaced all the carpet in the house, including in the basement. I guess that noticed the moisture problem because they splurged and went with an "insulated" carpet pad that gave the unpleasant mushy feeling of walking on a well established bed of mold. You've already seen what I did to the carpet upstairs, what do you think is going to happen here? Good guess.
Too bad they glued the carpet down (the tack strips were nailed AND glued), making removal a real bear. Ripping the stuff up wasn't so bad because they quarter-assed the glue application, but getting the glue they did apply was a nightmare. I ended up buying a 12" steel scraper from the BORG and spending a week scraping the floor as clean as possible in preparation for the new floor. More on that in a later post though.

What's a Bearing Wall, Again?

While my friend was pulling the ceiling down, I was busy tearing into a few walls that I wanted gone. I feel like I've typed this out before, but the original house is essentially divided into thirds along the east-west axis with load bearing walls on all floors. I have not yet determined if the building is platform or balloon construction, but the wall alignment is pretty obvious if you walk around the house for any length of time. Well, in the basement, there are footings for 6x6 posts that tie into tripled 2x8 beams that in turn, support the first floor joists. Great, except that when the finished the basement, they just took out one of the posts and built a wall in its place. Normally, that would be fine since they actually bolted the plates into the concrete, but most of the replacement wall was actually a pocket door cavity with no load bearing capacity whatsoever. That and most of the studs in the rest of the wall didn't actually span from top to bottom plate, oops. You know, that might explain why the floor on that side of the house seems to slope kinda funny...
Anyway, I wanted to expand the doorway into the finished half of the basement so I could move wood and tools around more easily, so out the pocket door came. At the same time, I also punched out a wall at the base of the stairs that backed into a closet in the little hallway off the finished half.

With just those two walls gone, everything opened up and it started to feel like a genuinely decent place to be. Just imagine a pair of wood french doors in that 5' opening.

Where We're Going, We Don't Need Walls

Apparently, wall removal is addictive. I saw the enlarged doorway and felt like it would feel a lot bigger without that stub-wall to the left. So out it came. I knew I needed to add back some structural support, so I rebuilt the remaining 1ft wall segment into bearing wall using salvaged studs that I tapcon'd into the concrete. Turns out the slab down there is actually decently thick, at least 3 inches, although it is pretty brittle. At the same time, I ripped out the back wall in the closet hallway and the built-in shelves near the HVAC unit for better circulation. opening up that wall really helped bring some much needed light to that corner of the basement.




 

In our next installment, we'll see if my vision for the basement becomes reality with new flooring and better lighting. Stay tuned for another really late episode of DEATH TO ALL CARPET!