Daniel, my husband is a very hard worker, go get 'em, don't rest until it's done or he's burned out kind of guy. While, I on the other hand, am a work on ten projects at a time slowly getting them all done. Daniel is a very time focused man. If it was up to him, we would never be late. Which of course means that I am the one who makes us late 90 out of 100 times, the other 10 are reasons out of our control. ;-)
Now that you know those things about us, you can imagine the frustration we both felt over the course of this renovation. Our first project was hard to decide on. Where do you start in a house where EVERYTHING (this is really only a slight exaggeration as you will see) has to be ripped out or painted and cleaned? Well, we decided to start in the basement. We figured that we could do what we wanted to the basement and then store stuff down there and move our stuff slowly upstairs as the rest of the house was ready. As often happens with best laid plans, none of that happened, but more on that in a later post.
First of all, I regret to inform you that for this particular project, I don't have actual photos of us doing the work. However, in the picture above you can see the white strip of paint around the bottom of the cinder block wall? THAT is our first project. It's this fancy stuff called DryLok. We found one gallon of it at a yard sale for free along with some other fabulous things including our kitchen light! When we started using this stuff we learned 4 things: 1) It's smelly. ewww. 2) It's thick and the cinder block is greedy when you apply it. 3) this was going to take much longer than we thought and 4) we were going to need quite a bit more. We had several options:
 |
| a gallon? |
 |
| A big bucket? |
 |
| a different brand? |
I had done a little research on this stuff. DryLok blocks moisture from coming into your basement, specifically through concrete/cinder block walls. It's called masonry paint. The big question was: Is this stuff worth it? Did we really need it? We sort of agonized over this. We didn't want our basement to flood or be damp. It is "underground" on 2 1/2 sides, but it's not in a flood plain or anything so do we even need to worry about it? Looking back, it definitely wasn't the biggest decision (wait until we get to stain color, eeeekkk!) This stuff was rather expensive though, as far as paint goes and we had JUST made the biggest purchase of both our lives so far. So being a "thrifty" (read that: cheapskate), I looked on craigslist. I found some for $10. YES! We bought the rest that we needed.
****For lack of pictures let me tell you about our basement. It is a large rectangle. There is a door at one end and a crawl space that runs the length of one side. It is open except for support poles here and there and the stairs that come down from the main floor. One of the shorter walls has a door and the other is solidly holding back all the dirt. The long wall along the back of the house is mostly windows that are underneath the back deck and about 1/3 holding back the dirt. The long wall along the front side of the house has a crawl-space going along the length of it so not much of it is actually holding dirt back. ****
The plan was to do all of the basement walls, but once we found how difficult it was to apply properly we opted for the whole wall that is all underground and then about 1/3 of the two long walls. The rest of the way around was mostly the bottom 2 or 3 rows of blocks. We do plan to finish painting the rest of the basement walls with something other than drylok "someday" (I am beginning to become wary of the elusive someday, because it never gets here!!)
Here is a sample picture of what it looks like to apply drylok, notice she is using a high nap roller. This means that there are longer strands on the roller so it can hold more paint and reach all the crevices. (photo from Google)
*Sorry, for the lack of interesting and eye catching photos. I think I kept track of most of the other projects we did. Also, I will check with Daniel and see if he has better photos of the drylok project.
**My husband would like to point out that proper application of drylok involves etching the walls first, which calls for another product (etching power etc.). This is tough to do because it is hard to wash cinder blocks without a hose. (Both pictures below are from Google)
***David my brother also helped out by doing some minor patching along the floor. I don't have pictures of him doing it but here is a picture from the internet (Google search) of someone else doing the same thing. We got the product (drylok fast plug) with the drylok we bought from Craigslist.
So do you have any questions I didn't answer? Do you have experience with this stuff?
I would love to know!
See ya next time,
Love,
Sarah
