Jason's basement build

[JasonB.]

About 18 months ago my wife lost her mother and father in a tragic car accident. We decided to sell our house and assume the mortgage for their house and the farm she grew up on. The house was built in 2005 and has a full ~1,500 square foot basement. The basement had always been a catch-all for storage since the house was built. When we moved in, there were literally trails through the stacks of boxes, bins, and other miscellaneous things that were down there with tables and toolboxes randomly spread throughout. Here's an idea of what it looked like.

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I would get up and go down there before work in the mornings to sort and rearrange while a drank my coffee. After a few weeks I had a work area cleaned out. It is a walk-out basement w/ a garage door on one end. As you can see in this photo, when you came through the garage door, you were looking at the toilet and shower in the unfinished bathroom at the other end. That's one to the 2 shepherds that came with the house.

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I also discovered that fall that when it rained hard and the wind was blowing just right, I had a couple of pretty bad leaks in the wall.

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[bczygan]

Good start. Looks like good tall ceilings.

Looking forward to progress!!!

Bill

 

[JasonB.]

The farm is located in north Alabama. Over the years there have been some pretty bad storms and some big tornados that passed through this area. For those of you familiar with the 2011 tornado outbreak, the Hackleburg–Phil Campbell EF5 tornado passed about 20 miles to our north, the Tuscaloosa EF4 passed about 20 miles to our south, and the Cullman EF4 lifted off the ground as it crossed the Tennessee river and passed directly over our farm, littering the whole area with lumber, vinyl siding, metal roofing, and all kinds of other debris from the buildings destroyed in Cullman and Arab.

I was not satisfied that the walk-out basement really afforded mu protection in the event a large tornado tracks across our house. My first order of business was to construct a safe room in the bathroom on the back corner. While researching, I came across the FEMA P-320 guide for site-built safe rooms. Three of the walls in that bathroom were already completely underground, so I just need to address the missing wall. I did the best I could without doing any demo for the existing slab or block.

First, I framed the new wall out of treated 2x6. As you can see, everything was doubled and the studs were placed on 1' centers.

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I anchored the base plate with steel expansion wedge anchors and applied Loctite PL 8X adhesive between the concrete slab and the bottom plate. You can also see that the wall is strapped and braced.

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For the outside wall covering, I placed 3/16" sheet steel over the entire wall and topped that with two layers of 1/2" plywood staggering the joints. I also found out that Mesker Door in Huntsville, AL builds tornado doors and frames. I called them up and placed my order. The sales person was extremely helpful with making sure I got all the details the way I wanted and a few days later I was able to drive out and pick it up.

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When it was all said and done, I ended up with ~$2k in about 8' of wall, but I now feel much more confident that my family has a safe place to go when tornado season rolls around again next month.

 

[JasonB.]

Good start. Looks like good tall ceilings.

Looking forward to progress!!!

Bill

Thanks. I'm just glad you can see my pictures. The first few threads I tried posting pictures in were complete fails.

 

[BlakeTheCarGuy]

Great looks fun. Sorry about the loss of your wife’s parents that is terrible. Basement leaks are no fun. When we had a water line installed the contractor made a hole somewhere and now it leaks and floods every time it rains they denied fault because they said we had no proof they hit it makes us angry lol.


Sent from my iPhone using Garage Journal

 

[250]

Thats a shame how you came into the property, but I really like how you decided to carry it on in the family.

I started out in a basement, there were a lot of features I liked about it. Moderate temperature year round, power right there, and super easy to walk down after the baby went to bed or what ever and putter around. Biggest down side for me was it wasn't a walk out, so everything went down the bulk head. You have walk out which is a huge plus.

Good luck with your plans, there's a lot of potential there.

 

[250]

Just an afterthought, this thread might be better in the garage gallery sub forum.

 

[rlmartinson]

My initial thought on your water issue, bad surface drainage on the outside. As wet as that block wall is, I am picturizing standing water up against the house.

 

[JasonB.]

Just an afterthought, this thread might be better in the garage gallery sub forum.

Good catch. I asked the mods to move it.

My initial thought on your water issue, bad surface drainage on the outside. As wet as that block wall is, I am picturizing standing water up against the house.

That's exactly what the problem was. When the wind was blowing just right, water was pooling at the base of the wall and seeping into the gravel around the block. Knock on wood, after a few attempts I think I have been able to fix it with my rake and shovel and several mornings waking up with a sore back.

 

[jollygreengiant]

Thats a shame how you came into the property, but I really like how you decided to carry it on in the family.

My thoughts as well.

You mentioned it's a farm. I take it there is some land with it? Any outbuildings?

 

[JasonB.]

Thank you all for the kind sentiments. Losing them was (and still is) very tragic. This is the farm my wife grew up on with her two brothers. It was also like a second home to me growing up. I married my best friend's little sister. My family also has a small farm about a mile down the road.

Each of the farms are about 100 acres. We raise cows for beef and I have a flock of free range chickens that were her father's. He always loved birds and was always coming up with something new and often exotic. When he passed away he had three different mated pairs of African pheasants, baby ducks, two coveys of baby quail, and lots of young chicks. We also had two additional sets of eggs that hatched in his incubator in the weeks after his passing. I kept the chickens, we set the quail and ducks free when they were big enough, and we found new homes for the pheasants.

With that said, we have a couple of big pole barns, but they are not enclosed. They are for storing equipment, supplies, hay, etc. Her brother and I have talked about turning part of one into a hobby wood working shop. But that's a thread for another time. For now I'm focused on getting my basement garage in order so that I have a place to play mechanic and work on projects.

 

[JasonB.]

Speaking of out buildings, a couple of years ago I tore down an old catch pen that was on our family farm. This thing was already old when I was a kid. A lot of it was rough cut oak. Although time had taken its toll and they were no longer good for working cattle, I noticed that a lot of the boards still had some sections that were quite sound. I decided to salvage some of the materials for my basement garage.

There were certainly some different species in the mix and some had held up better than others.

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Some of the boards I just used as they were and some of the thicker boards I planed down to minimize the variance in thickness. Even after all those years, there was still some very pretty wood there when I started planing it.

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Some of the boards were pretty warped and required some persuasion to get in place.

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Here's how it turned out. I'm happy with it, the wife loves it, and the other old shepherd approves.

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[JasonB.]

One of the things I have always wanted is a man cave. One of the wife's top wants in the house was a room for guests. I decided to propose a compromise with part of the basement. This is the area between my garage workshop and the safe room. The couch is a sleeper sofa, so now it can pull double duty as my man cave and a place for company on the rare occasions that we have out of town quests. Every man needs a room with a cow skin rug, bull horns, and a European mount deer skull.

I was able to frame out the faux post and beam walls pretty cheap and used some paneling from Lowe's to get it up quick. I got some drop ceiling grid cheap on the local CL and cut the panels from material I salvaged from the roof of the old barn I had torn down. My father-in-law was always very into birds, so I turned one of his old heaters into a light fixture. I've actually got another one that I think I will do as well. The floor was a whole debacle in itself (I have another post about that), but it is a combination of acid stain and Delta Dye.

There had been a leak in the blocks on the back wall resulting in large areas of something black growing. (My wife is convinced it was black mold.) I addressed some grading issues in the yard outside that wall and hopefully have the leak resolved. My father-in-law had covered the interior wall with a thick layer of drylok in an attempt to stop the leak. I used a roll of polyethylene to create a containment room around the wall and removed the old coating along with the growth with a combination of aircraft stripper and soda blasting. I bought enough Xypex (which is the only product I have ever seen stop water infiltration from the interior of a wall) to coat that portion of wall, but if the grade work I did works and I don't get any additional infiltration, I don't know that I will install it. I think the wall is pretty cool as-is, although it drives my wife nuts and she bugs me about painting it every time she comes down there.

 

[thammel]

Jason - So sorry about the way you got the property but it is great that you kept it in the family. As to the leaky wall, the way to really address it is on the outside. I would even excavate outside and consider putting in a drainage system out there. Leaks are no good!

 

[JasonB.]

I totally agree about addressing the leaks on the outside. I think a lot of the issues were from the gutter downspouts getting blown back toward the house when the wind was just right. I extended all the downspouts to the ground and dug some very small ditches with a hoe and shovel. So far that seems to have resolved the issue.

 

[captain14]

Interesting build. The basement leaks need to be found and addressed before you get too far into the buildout of the space.

 

[TimTaylor75]

What a history here. Extremely sorry for y'all's loss, but so great of you to decide to keep things in the family and going. Will be looking forward to your updates as what's been shared so far, is really intriguing. Thanks for sharing it with us!

 

[JasonB.]

Thanks everyone. I'm excited about having the ability to work on projects without having to go out of the house for the first time in my life. Not to mention the basement should stay relatively cool in the summer. A while back I was looking at how I wanted to layout the basement garage. After playing around on SketchUp I landed on this. I'm currently finishing up one of the planned work benches and will hopefully be to something pretty close to this in the next couple of weeks.