A New Basement Floor (Again)

A little over two years ago, Drew and I decided that it was time to do something with the hideous mess that was our basement, and give it a face lift.  I gave a little video tour of the before here.

I suck at follow up apparently, because I never did an after.  Honestly, we never completely finished it. It was done, and workable, but not completely.  My small studio is down there, and some workout equipment.

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing a video tour of our house to show some friends, and I included the basement.  As I was taping and walking across the basement floor, I noticed that it squished as I walked across it.  The boards also looked a little warped.  Not so good!

My first thought was that water had come in through the french doors and underneath the flooring.  We replaced the old door last summer when we were doing all of the exterior repairs, and put in a new door that opened on both sides.

I told Drew when we got home that evening about the squishy floors and he immediately went downstairs to investigate.  Much to our surprise, the water did not come from the door, but from our water heater.  I guess that the bottom decided to no longer hold the water that it was supposed to, and instead, leak it all over our floor.

Here you can see how warped the floor boards were.  If you walked closer to the door, which is behind me in the picture, you could actually squish water up between the boards.  My heart sort of broke when I realized how much damage had been done.

Drew got to work the next day calling the insurance company.  They immediately sent out a restoration company to start quoting us prices for clean up and repair.  The man that came determined that about the half of the large room and a small portion of the hallway had been damaged.  Thankfully, the water had not gotten into the drywall or underneath the bathroom floor.

Drew and his dad decided that they could do all of the clean up and repair themselves, and worked out all of the details with the insurance company.  We have replaced the water heater, and the floors are almost done now.

This is the current state of my basement.  But, the floors are down!  We've decided to run the floor boards in the other direction than what we originally laid them.  We thought that we could get away with not putting a break in the room.  We did notice, before we noticed the water damage, that some of the boards were separating.  We think that had to do with how large of an area we laid.  The company recommends that you not have an area greater than 16 feet, I think, without doing a break.  So, we decided to put a break in the floor this time.  Not ideal, but we think that it will keep the boards nicer for longer.

Drew also decided that he really wanted to create a tile entryway at the doors.

The transition pieces still need to be installed, but this is the tile.  It is the same tile that is on the bathroom floor.

Here is a close up of the new floor, which obviously still needs to be cleaned.  This new floor is the same one that we bought last time.  However, we noticed that the color is a little browner than the old stuff.  If you look at the damaged floor above, you can see that it's redder.  It wasn't that red in real life, some of it is crappy photo lighting, but it was definitely redder than this new stuff.  Strange.

It shouldn't be too much longer before we are finished.  We've already talked about buying some area rugs to warm the space up.  Drew's ultimate goal was to have a TV with surround sound and nice furniture.  I'm not sure if we're going to get that far, but I'll update as we go.