Basement Underpin: Week Six Wrap Up

They only worked 4 days this week, (took Wed off and worked today). The black delta dimple sheet is up, and they started framing the walls! You can see the floors have been covered up to prevent any dings.  They look much lighter after replacing the burnt out light bulbs and having everything covered with a ton of sawdust.

The framing was not what we expected. We were not happy about the 2 1/2"- 5" gap between the base of the footings/dimple sheet and the new wall.  Those are precious inches that we can't afford to waste!  You see when you underpin, you end up with massively thick walls (10"+) because of the new footings. The reason for the largest gaps (in the laundry room) was because of plumbing.  The solution: notch the 2x4 and frame flush with the plumbing.

Creative Construction1
In the main living space it was tough for them to build a true wall that tight to the new footings.  We understand that, however we were looking at this huge cavity between the new 2x4 wall and the block and I just wanted more.  This is where we had to get creative.  After some brainstorming2 we found out that a ledge IS possible3. (I know, this was, like, my original idea from, like, ages ago)  This bad boy ledge will be about 6" thick! Can you believe it?  Talk about taking back space! It will be a built in shelf around the room!!!  So exciting to me! Its like Christmas in ...ummm..April? Is it April?  Anyways it is going to happen.  I willed it and now it will be.  We decided the best height is 32"...slightly above table top height (30") but not as high as a counter (36") or typical wainscoting (42"). You can see they have already started building it

Smaller Utility Room
Yes you heard right! Originally we thought the wall of the utility room would have to be moved out far enough to incorporate the tubes for the radiant floor, but we can run the tubes through the wall.  So the utility room can shrink a bit.  We still need to determine how much space is needed for a heat exchanger (the thing that takes the water from the boiler and cools it enough to pipe it through the floor).  Hopefully this is not a large device.


One of the two support posts is INSIDE the bathroom
The post that was supposed to be tucked into the bathroom wall will now be inside of the bathroom.  Clearly someone measured wrong. Suuuuux!!!!!  They will hide it by building a little niche behind the door and making it into a storage space.  I guess these things happen during construction.  At least my bathroom doesn't have to shrink because of it.

Next week the contractor is away.  His son is in charge.  The crew should be able to finish the walls. They are only working 4 days so they shouldn't be able to make too much trouble! The gas guy is also stopping by to hook up the boiler and the floors.

1. I know I am using subtitles in a blog post - sue me!
2 Me standing there with my hands on my hips asking a ton of questions that all started with "what about..." until I finally got a hint of the answer I wanted.  
3. One of the problems was they can't drive nails into the floor because of the radiant heating, so they needed to make sure the bottom part of the wall doesn't move if someone slams a couch into it.  They decided to glue the hell out of the bottom 2x4 (sill plate) so it will take a tank to move it

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