The Home Stretch

This post is long overdue but better late than never, right?

Last week Tuesday my uncle Frank came over and painted our basement. He made the offer to help months ago and trust me, this was not an offer I would easily forget. It's not that I hate to paint, I just don't think that I'm very good at it. Plus, it takes me days. Maybe if we had better equipment or if I just had a better attitude it would go faster. I don't know but I'm very grateful for Frank's help last week!

Here are the new colors! Flash photography doesn't really do the colors justice but you get the general idea. The color scheme now should flow nicely with the rest of the house and we already know that it looks awesome with the carpet. And speaking of carpeting...the carpet is going to get a new pad and be re-laid June 5. The carpet cleaners are coming June 6 and on June 7 we are moving everything back in. I can't wait!

This past week we also reinstalled the bookcase. Sort of a funny thing happened with this. Shortly after we had it screwed to the wall and it was clear that it was flush with the wall I made the comment that I had never noticed this slight gap that now appeared on the side. Brian looked at it and then it hit us both at the same time. Originally, the bookcase was installed PRIOR to drywalling. Now the part that was sunk inside the drywall is clearly exposed because the drywall came first this time. Oh well, this is what molding is for, right?

The first time we did the basement (five years ago) we took the doors that lead from the stairwell to the laundry room off and put them on the new closet. This way the doors matched the other closet right next to the new one. To solve our unsightly door opening we just hung a curtain. It was never meant to be a permanent solution but five years later we still had that curtain. Now, we decided to finish this they way it was meant to be. Brian and my dad are going to work on doors sometime in the near future. Due to scheduling, it probably won't get done until after the carpet is fixed but that's okay. Really, the doors are just aesthetics. You can see the difference in wall colors in this picture. the yellow on the right is the old "light" color in the basement. The other wall is the new color and the color on the left of the door is the color of the stairwell. The yellow wall will eventually be painted that color. I just didn't want to paint it knowing that work was going to need to be done and we'd probably just have to paint it again.

Finally, for this post, I'd like to leave you with some pretty pictures of my flowers!

Last year we didn't actually get to see this forcynthia bloom because it was done by the time it got planted. This year we got to enjoy it. I wish I would have taken a picture at it's "prime." This was taken the last week in April.
If I remember correctly, these are some tulips from bulbs that were brought back from the Netherlands. That was probably illegal but they got through Customs!
Our crab apple...all the flowering tress are so pretty right now!
And finally, my newest find: a bottle brush hanging basket! We had to get it, it reminded us of San Diego plus it's just so unusual! This was my little souvenir from Green Bay this weekend.

Quick Update

Tonight Brian finished priming the walls while I started putting things away. Now that we are painting the whole freakin' basement there was a pile of our stuff that needed to be moved to gain access to the pony wall. Tomorrow I plan to prepare the other walls to paint, we need to make a decision about the bookshelf (push it all the way into the corner or keep it where it was), and we need to move a few more pieces of the bookshelf. It's a big bookshelf if you remember.

Figures

Ok, so after learning that I needed a 14 inch taping knife, another coats, some pressure and a little patients, the walls ended up turning out good. I'm satisfied with them. The textured primer went on, albeit with help from Andi, a little slow, but looks good too.

Now we come to the problem. The color. We would have sworn that we had both colors of paint sitting with all of our other paint. As it turns out, we only had one. In a feeble attempt to get that paint, we headed to Menards hoping they were a little "Big Brother" and kept those records. They didn't. We have resigned ourselves to the fact that we'll need to finish priming all of the walls and Andi is heading to Ace right now for new paint colors.

!@#$

I think we'll be taking Uncle Frank up on his offer to help.

Check Out the Ugly Bathroom...

Last week (yes I know, this post is very much over due), we said a final goodbye to our ugly pink bath tub and horrible brass shower door. I tried to make these pictures especially horrendous.

Like that?

Check out the mildew...that caulk always got the better of me as I would try to clean it

The grout was pretty good and I really didn't have any complaints about the tile...it was just the bathtub. We tossed around the idea of doing a tub liner or re-glazing but also wanted to update the pipes in the wall. Since there is no access panel, one side of the wall was going to have to be destroyed. Updating the pipes and covering everything up with a full tube liner seemed like the way to go.

And here are the results!

Beautiful, don't you think!

By the way, don't think we won the lottery or anything. This project was actually partially paid for prior to the drama of the basement and was how we spent our tax return this year. If the basement would have sprung a leak just a few days earlier, we probably wouldn't have done this project.

Now, we just need to replace the ugly toilet! Someday...

Now, onto the basement...
We are finally ready to start putting our lives back together. We had some concerns that a few walls were still wet so a technician came out today and checked everything out. He checked all the access points and bleeders and it all looked good so I guess I should just chill out. I think that once you experience water in your basement you spend a lifetime freaking out over little things that might mean problems. I really just want this to be all over. I want the file cabinet out of my living room along with the ironing board and the boxes of items we didn't know where to go with. It's pretty bad over here...

Day 7: New Reason This is an Inconvience

We can't do laundry.

I don't know why this didn't occur to either of us during the planning stages. If you jackhammer concrete up to replace something, new concrete is going to be left. New concrete takes time to cure.
Washing machines, the tub they empty into and dryers generally sit along the wall. Drain tile is along the walls and therefore we have we concrete right where our washer, tub, and dryer sit. The dryer we were able to set up because the vent, gas line and other cords were long enough. However, the washing machine is going to have to sit for awhile.

Thank goodness we have such great neighbors. I've been running back and forth between our house this weekend doing laundry.

According to the basement people we should wait THREE weeks before we do much downstairs in terms of putting it back together. According to our friend who is a structural engineer, he said concrete will have 80% of it's strength after one week. I think we'll hook up the washing machine next weekend.

Catching Up on Day 3

And we are done...with this part.

The company that we hired finished up late Wednesday afternoon. They had brought an extra guy to work with them in hopes that everything would go faster since our city inspectors like to screw with people or have something personal against our property (seriously, I'm beginning to think there's an ordinance just for us. Discussing the drama we went through with the garage might make for an interesting post someday). Anyhoo, here's what Wednesday ended with...

That pipe coming up is one of four access points that will allow our system to be flushed out or have maintenance performed on it if necessary. This is in the "new" room...the dirty wall is our old exterior wall. Since there is old drain tile all along that wall that got replaced with new stuff. It might seem like overkill but once you have had water in your basement I don't know if you can ever be overcautious!

This is the wall/corner that had been causing us so many problems. Once everything is dry we can get started cleaning up and scrubbing the walls. Even though drywall is going back up I don't want all that mold/mildew on the walls.

Logan leaving his mark on the floor
Ethan leaving his hand prints in the basement forever
Why not? If you have wet cement, how can you possibly resist putting hand prints in it?

A while ago I stated, "This is not the most inconvenient project we have done." I'd like to retract that statement for consideration. Stay tuned...I'll explain why this weekend. It might move into 1st place.

Day 2 - Save the Drama for your Mama

I really didn't know what to expect. The guys from Badger Basement came promptly at 7:30. There wasn't much of the hard digging left, since the new basement was pretty much dug, there was only some little digging or expanding left.

There was a lot of noise. Jackhammers here, gigantic masonry drills there, you know the standard work. I managed to log into work and get a crap load of stuff done from home. I tried to dial into a bunch of meetings, but it was hard to hear over all of the racket. I would hear the frequent cutting of plastic, as I was certain they were cutting the lengths of their patented "WaterGuard" system. It was right around lunch when I was I hearing the pounding of the jack hammer.

Then it stopped. Then I heard an "uh-oh."
I don't know if I want to hear someone with a jack hammer say "uh-oh." It would be that they were poking holes in the cement blocks to relieve the water pressure and build up along and inside the blocks, when magically they sprung a leak.

Now to Andi and I this isn't surprising, as some of those blocks looked water logged. They had to open the bleeder holes in order to all for the outside water to seep in and into their WaterGuard system. It was after lunch that the drama started.

I heard someone else come over, and I presumed it was someone that these guys knew. It turned out to be the city inspector. !@#%, I said mildly. This won't be good.

You see, there have been all sorts of issues with the city and the city inspectors. I swear to god, they find fault, just to make work for others. It's like they don't want their constituency to succeed in any way. When the guy left, one of the workmen came up stairs and had to tell me about the change in plans.

It would seem that the city doesn't like how shallow they are digging. But that's what they do. The whole premise of the WaterGuard system is that it sits on top of your footings to direct water from the high water table away from the walls and floor to the sump pump. But if they have to dig down into the footings, that's a crap load of more work, and harder too, since the footings are so solid. So, what they decided to do was to ditch the WaterGuard system, and give us something close to it.

They're replacing all of the drain tile with newer PVC pipe of some sort. It's not the same as the corrugated pipe that is traditionally put down, and does crap for actually draining water (I read about that.) This pipe is smoother, and will allow the water to flow easier. They are also going to put in the wall diverter. It's hard to describe, but essentially it's a piece of aligator plastic (it's got all of these ridges, hence the name) that sits along the wall and footing. This piece allows the bleeder holes to drain into the new drain tile.

So essentially we're getting the WaterGuard system, just not in one hand dandy do it themself installation product. Also, this is more work becuase now they are hammering out a little more floor, and all of the drain tile.

That works for me! After all, we're hoping that we can prove to the insurance company that the reason the basement flooded was faulty drain tile. The tile was so old and full of gunk that it could not handle the water load and backed up into our basement. I'll let you see the pictures and you can decide if the tiles could handle the load.