Iowa 80 Basement Project - rebooted!

Preface: I started a build thread a couple of years ago, which can be accessed here. It's now in the archive, and for good reason, because I haven't updated it in forever. Rather than dragging that thing up, I figured it was time to start anew, as we need to polish off room 1 (tv room), tackle rooms 2 (bedroom) and 3 (bathroom), finish my PhD, close out our permit, and put the house on the market, all by the end of next summer, and all with a (now) 16 month old running around.

Refresher: House


Basement (tv room) we started with



Basement tv room - current state




The purpose of this new thread is two-fold.
1) So I can pick people's brains about random things that come up during construction
2) So everyone in the forum can keep me accountable to actually make the progress on this project that I need to.

We have decided in the interest of time, hassle, and sanity, to put major construction items out to bid. These items include egress window installation in the proposed bedroom, HVAC revision in bedroom to maximize ceiling height, electrical (numerous existing electrical lines are run along joist bottoms, rather than through them, plus new circuit for bathroom), bathroom plumbing, and then drywall (because I spent 3 months mudding and taping the drywall in the tv room, and I'm still not happy with how it turned out). So, if anyone is in the eastern/central Iowa area, and has contractors they recommend, I'm all ears.

Now I turn things over to you. In order to prevent my usual "oh, I haven't had time to log in to the forums in a while" response, I'm setting my homepage to this thread, so I will be forced to check for responses every time I open a browser window.

Thanks for your views / comments, it's going to be a team effort to get this project done in time.

Tim
Edited by doublfelix - 8/16/12 at 8:59pm

I'm sure I will end up regretting it, but it did it's job already today, because I am here replying to posts already. Also, PMs with good info too.

Hopefully tonight. I have the before pictures for our first project now that we're going again, and am planning to have the after pictures ready this evening.

So sometimes, the first step in a project is finding that project underneath all of the clutter that can accumulate in a house. This was supposed to be the eventual storage / utility room


And then this the eventual bedroom?


That's obviously not going to work. Here's what I have been trying to finish up the last 5 or 6 days, though darkness, a teething child, and the desire to not be hated by all my neighbors have kept me from being able to get all the cutting done needed to get this done.


I need to add a few supports underneath the shelf platforms and then attach those platforms before I can load it up. Once finished, this shelf, and a smaller one that is out of view in the photo, will provide storage for 16 of our containers. Hopefully this solves the old issue - if you can't get to stuff, you can't get rid of it.

Also, I'm going to issue a blanket apology for the picture quality - I've been using my phone lately because I can upload to photobucket directly, thus cutting out the step of having to transfer to computer and then upload. It makes posting easier, and although the images aren't the greatest, they should suffice for this early and low detail work.

Staying local seems to be pretty difficult if you've gotten your PhD here, as the university doesn't like to do a lot of hiring from within. I am also trying to make the jump from environmental engineer/geochemist to marine geochemist, which means I am looking at postdocs in marine science and oceanography programs, neither of which are very common here in the midwest. Basically, it's not looking good for me sticking around the area.

As for the house, I got my shelves assembled and bolted to the wall for safety, and now nearly every single one of the rubbermaid containers cluttering up my basement has been accounted for.


I also organized and moved my workbench into the work side of the basement.


So now I have a proper place to work on small projects, like fixing the various electronic items and toys that my son gets a hold of and subsequently breaks. I am otherwise dying a slow death taking old electronics items to Best Buy for recycling, sorting through the things we were supposed to sell at our garage sale (never happened), and getting rid of random building materials that we inherited with the house.

This weekend, I am hoping to get started on something fun - finishing out the interior of the equipment closet! Here's a teaser pic to show everyone the hideous (although perfectly functioning) mess that I'm about to wade into. I'll just apologize now, and hope that someone can save us from the spaghetti.


If all that mess wasn't relatively invisible from the front of the rack, I'm sure I would never have let it sit like that for so long. Now that I've got a picture of it, I'll be super annoyed until it is fixed.

So here's a question that hopefully someone can help with. As you can see, I've got smurf tube that is longer than it needs to be on the left side of that equipment closet, with speaker wire inside. Does anyone have a clean method for cutting that tubing without damaging what's inside? I seem to recall when I was originally installing it, that I would use a hacksaw to cut through one side of one of the ribs, then basically break the rest off. It was effective, but ugly and probably not good to do all that bending with the wires inside.

Thanks RT, your exacto suggestion worked perfectly, after a little bit of practice on some scrap smurf tube to get "the feel" dialed in.

Anyway, it's been a long time with no updates, I figure I should throw out some photos of the minor progress that I've made. I was able to trim back much of the excess smurf tube and wiring in the equipment closet, so that stuff is just awaiting drywall and low voltage boxes to sit in. Before I can do that though, I needed to put a floor in there, which I did with some leftover Platon and OSB from doing the floor in the tv room. The closet is so small and awkward that it's tough to get a decent view in one camera shot.


I also tore off the previous paneling on the wall, and got rid of the framing that was mounted directly to the foundation wall. This week I plan to patch / clean / etch the wall to prep it for drylok, then frame up a new mini wall the right way, at which point I can put up some of my leftover drywall and clean up the wiring once and for all.

In the meantime, we have been gathering bids for the first few critical items that need to be hired out before I can start really building up the bedroom. We've put a deposit down for our egress window install, and we're just waiting to get it scheduled. This window is going to turn into a 28"x41" egress window, which is south facing, and thus should make the room pretty bright for being in the basement.


We are also having a plumber in to remove this gas line that runs over to our electric dryer, and to clean up that rat's nest of piping.


Getting all that excess gas pipe out of the way will then allow us to have someone take this HVAC line and move it next to the beam, where the unused gas pipe currently is. They're also going to make the supply wider and less tall, which should allow us to gain somewhere between 2 and 4" of ceiling height, which is critical when your already at 6'11" from floor to joists.


My plan is to enclose that HVAC supply in a soffit, along with all the electrical that runs along the beam. I'll throw out a few questions and see if anyone has run into these items before.

1. Junction boxes in a soffit? My current plan will involve enclosing at least 2 j boxes in the soffit, which I will have to maintain access to. I've used the plastic access panels you can get from the big box stores for water shutoff valves, etc. in the ceiling, but I wonder if anyone has done something more creative.

2. I plan on taking advantage of this time while we are waiting for contractor items by running all of the low voltage stuff I never got around to before. Does anyone have recommendations for tools that I'll need to run coax and cat5 throughout the basement and the ground floor rooms that I have access to through the basement?

Thanks for any advice you can give. Hopefully my next update should come in a couple of weeks, and will include an egress window as well as a much cleaner looking equipment closet.

Hey Weasel, thanks for the wiring tool advice. I think the low voltage wiring fun will be one of my winter break projects. In the meantime, we've been fairly busy around here. I'll try and keep things organized chronologically, which could be interesting since I shot pictures with a bunch of different cameras. So where did we leave off?

Well the window in the soon to be bedroom / office looked like this.

Then a hole appeared

I was really glad to have hired this job out, because about 12" down they found an old concrete window well (including rebar, tied into the foundation) that was buried. Luckily, they brought a jackhammer, and made pretty short work of it.

Once the hole was ~ 4 feet deep, they pulled out the old window, and started cutting into the foundation.

Here's what it looked like when the cutting was done

Any geologist types want to identify these different soil horizons? Better not B.S. though, my wife spends 50% of her time at work drilling holes all over Iowa, so she's the resident USCS expert.

Framed and sealed. Looks like a much better job than whatever I would have come up with.

Then the window went in


Here's how it looks tonight from inside


I guess I'll have to shoot some pics from outside this weekend, I don't appear to have any once the well was finished and filled with gravel, and the window was trimmed out. It's still a shock every time I walk down there to see such a big window. It looks great though, and will look even better once it's part of a proper room.

We also had a plumber out to deal with our gas piping. The gas meter, water heater, and furnace are all on the south side of the house. This rat's nest was in the middle of the basement, so it was blocking where the HVAC will be moved to, and also eventually ran above the HVAC supply, pushing it down about 2" and further impacting our ceiling height (which is only about 6'11" in the best locations).

So we went from this

To this.

Here's a sampling of what got pulled and replaced by maybe 10 feet of pipe.


I also managed to get the foundation wall in the equipment closet prepped and painted

I patched together some scrap pieces of foamboard, and the adhesive is curing as I am post this. Here's my high tech setup to make sure it bonds nicely to the foundation wall overnight. I believe the industry term for this is overengineering, but I'm always trying to have fun with whatever project I have going.

If things go well this weekend, I might have some drywall up, but that will depend on whether my wife feels better. While our 20-month old is totally on board helping with home improvement projects, I'm not sure I trust him to run our powder actuated nailer. He's a champ when it came to wrapping our old school double hung windows upstairs though.

Ok, so here's another question I'll throw out. Right now, our cable feed from the pole is split 4 ways at the bottom of the pole, 1 leg goes to the second floor bedroom, one goes to a first floor bedroom, and one goes to the basement. The fourth leg is unused, as it used to run around the outside of the house and in one of the windows on the other side of the basement (we removed that whole run when we replaced the window). I'm going to switch out the 4-way splitter for a 3-way, and then deal with any further distribution in the basement. The basement leg enters the house right where the electrical panel is located. If I plan to wire the basement / first floor rooms for coax, where seems like the best spot to home run all of those cables to? Possibilities include near the electrical panel, in the equipment closet (under the stairs), or somewhere in the unfinished space. I've run into problems with my signal upstairs after splitting 4 -> 2 -> 2 (-14 dB drop), though I think that is because one of the splitters went bad. Still, after splitting 4 -> 2 ways, my cable modem shows a signal strength of -11 dB, which seems like it's right on the edge of not good enough, so I have some concerns about how much signal splitting I can do. Recommendations?

When I made that last post, I had intended to include this old electrical diagram so that my description of locations would actually mean something.


I think running everything from the vicinity of the electrical panel makes the most sense for a number of reasons, I just wasn't sure if it would be a big concern for interference from being in proximity to so much 120V wiring. The amplifier advice is definitely helpful - I had a feeling I needed something along those lines, but there are so many that seem suited to different purposes, I wasn't sure what the most appropriate option would be.

The next question I'm going to run into is now - given that I'll be wiring up at least 5 new runs of coax from that spot in the basement, but not likely using all of them (frankly I'm not sure I'll use any, but I figure they're worth running while I have access from below) - does anyone have recommendations/advice for a patch panel type setup for coaxial distribution? And since I'm now adding the coax distribution near the electrical panel, is there any reason I should re-think having the network distribution area in the equipment closet (under stairs in diagram) as currently planned?

It may be worth mentioning that the electrical panel is going to be behind a wall in the bedroom, so I'll have to come up with a creative way to cover it while maintaining access. Adding things like coax and networking distribution will increase the footprint for that creative covering, so that's always an additional consideration.