One of the recommended repair projects around Brownstone and Old town houses is to repair a basement. Usually these basements are quite spacious and may add substantial useful square footage to your home. Main challenge here is to make space with all the pipes and unfinished walls and floor, and increased moisture livable and comfortable. For this kind of projects, you can hire us, or, if you decide to do it yourself, we would recommend to follow the steps outlined below.
In this article, on the example of Old Town House basement (Picture 1) renovation project, we will describe how you can renovate your basement and transform it to very nice living area without spending a fortune.
First thing you need to do is fixing the ceiling. Most practical way to do that would be to install drywall, mainly because it allows to hide pipes. Pipes that are right up against the old ceiling, may easily go under the sheetrock; but pipes that are lower, usually need to be boxed.
New framing for drywall needs to be screwed to the old beams and it needs to go low enough to hide all the pipes except the ones that are getting boxed.
In order to get nice and leveled ceiling, you need to install framing in level. This task might be very tricky, but Laser level tool comes very handy for this purpose. With horizontal red laser line, that goes around 360 degrees, you can easily determine the height where your new ceiling should be. Just find level where the red line touches the lowest point of the ceiling or piping (again, this excludes pipes that need to be boxed) and you get the exact height where the framing should be placed. Since the old ceiling most likely will not be in level, distance between the old surface and the red line will be different and that means that you will need to use different amount of shims (pics 2 and 3) to make proper adjustments to install the framing in level. After installing all the framing using this technique you will get leveled framing ready for drywall.
Then you need to box the pipes that are sticking out main framing. Boxes may have different shapes depending on shapes, sizes and directions of pipes. In our case boxes were rectangular and at some point even triangular (Pics 4 &5)
After making all necessary wiring you can install drywall against ceiling and box framings. Make sure you leave proper openings for lighting, access panels and other switch handles.
After spackling, sanding and painting drywall, you are ready to get to the walls. Like the ceiling, the walls also may be framed and hidden under the drywall, but simple painting is also a very good option: it allows you to keep as much space as possible; repainted stone walls look much classier than painted drywall.
Before painting walls they need to be carefully cleaned. We would recommend to vacuum walls in order to remove the dust between the bricks and stones. After that you can prime and paint walls with “exterior and interior” paint. In basements with excessive moisture, before painting, we would recommend to apply special moisture resistant sealer – grey or white thick substance called “DRYLOCK”- that seals the surface and does not allow moisture to come in. After this material dries completely – usually one day – you can paint the walls.
The floors are treated in a similar way. Only difference is that, for more strength, it is better to cover them with sand and cement screed with metal or fiber fittings . After drying, prime and paint with floor paint.
After all the work you have done in your basement, some pipes may still remain visible, but you can deal with them by using different creative solutions, like the ones on pictures 5,6 & 7.
As you can see on the last picture, after proper framing, painting and nice decorating work, the basement can be transformed into a beautiful addition to your Brownstone or Old Town House.
