In our Long goal to renew our basement and make it a more functioning space, we first had to gut and strip it down. The plan for now is to water seal the basement walls and floor.

Here are the issues:

1. 3 cracks in the poured foundation. They had previously been patched with Hydraulic Cement but since have moved needing new repair. Only one small spot was actually letting water through like a spout on a heavy rain day.
2. Basement floor has a steep pitch to center drain with sump pump. This is not a steady slope as there are cracks along the perimeter where the floor may have settle causing a crack and irregular slopes
   
3. Walls and Floor are painted. Floor has an old waterproof layer and some of the walls do too. then everything had a coat of general cream colored paint, not for waterproofing.
   
4. Lowest point in the foundation is not the drain. Duluth flood of 2013 ruined a lot of homes (I had no damage) but the city replaced residential sump pumps at no cost. Great. But they took out old and installed the new 4ft away (#*%!). water would pool in the low spot and I would either push it to the drain or use my shop vac to clean and dump outside.

All of these factored into the plan of attack. The cracks needed to be repaired, fine, but that means the paint and area around the cracks need to be clean and stripped of paint. Then came the question of what caliber of “waterproof” did we want to do. basic paint or Loctite? I decided Loctite which is a thicker barrier that bonds with the concrete. This means all of the areas I will use this need to be bare concrete. The Floor will be Stripped and sealed with Loctite, then the wall will be painted with a foundation paint.

First business is to demolition any structures that need to go.  This includes an old storage room, a weird old broken shower stall station and the large old 350 gallon Oil tank that hasn’t been used in many years.

Then we figure out a method for actually stripping decades old paint from concrete.

Order of Progress:

1. Try chemicals to get through the layers and strip the walls
2. repeat for floor

Walls didn’t go so well with stripping agents or at least would have taken way too many hours to complete. Since most of the walls were in fine shape I decided to only strip and clean around all of the cracks I wanted to mend.

Now onto the Floor. This went a little easier rolling on the stripping agent, letting sit for 12hrs then power washing the section (this took about 1.5hrs each). We did the basement in 4 sections after work each day. It felt good to have a clean and well washed basement but my thoughts started to assess the next steps. It was obvious where the pitch needed to be addressed and where I would lay more concrete to even that out. I also thought through the Apoxy injection crack repair and didn’t want a wet day ruining the job from outside.

This led to a decision to inspect and address the grade and water flow outside.

See next post for Project French Drain.