Old Poured Basement Wall Refinishing

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Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
^ I agree with expat. Frankly most new homes disgust me. Sorry, dont mean to be offensive, but we can agree to disagree. Standard parts from the Home Depot moulding aisle do not make for a very interesting home, instead each one looks like every other one.



I suppose if you look at the average tract home then you might have a point. But there are plenty of high quality newer homes out there, many with plenty of character.

Back when we used to provide the capital to a team that did house flipping we got to see some things in both older homes that would simply leave me shaking my head. Occasionally a vintage house would have pine floors like yours, but they were laid directly on the joists-no sub flooring (substandard even when it was built). Unless some serious modernization has been done, homes of that vintage rarely have any insulation to speak of, the windows leak, there is asbestos, and old cast iron sewer pipes fail and leak. They have knob and tube substandard wiring, wet basements, failing plaster ceilings that were covered over with those awful little 12 X 12 acoustic ceiling tiles, tiny little garages, horrid white aluminum siding, and the laundry list goes on. To top it off you have 80 years of DIY repairs that are often marginal at best and frequently substandard themselves.

Not to mention that many houses of that vintage are in tightly packed, less than desirable inner city neighborhoods where no one in their right mind would want to own a home or raise a family. Those neighborhoods tend to attract those who can't afford anything more modern, and have to settle for a vintage house (and claim they live there because it has character).

To each his own, but both vintage and modern homes have their advantages and disadvantages. My personal preference is our almost 20 year old custom home, designed by us for us. But you are certainly welcome to your vintage home, with its wet basement/disintegrating parging issues. I'll enjoy our fully finished, waterproofed walkout basement and I can spend my time doing things other than fretting over home repairs.

short version: they where cheap builders then, they are cheap builders now.

P.S. you two should meet over a couple bottles of wine...

PS to PS: JH, do you plan for this house to be your retirement house? i'm not in construction business/domain, but beside the water table, can you make sure the rain/snow water gets as faraway as possible from the building? this and a few tweaks/repairs in the roof draining system, made a HUGE improvement in the basement humidity levels of one of my rentals...
 
I guess you can draw a parallel with Cars (seeing as this is basically a "Car guy' site)

You can buy a NEW model. You know you won't have to deal with installing new tires or Muffler tail pipes (for a while)
You HOPE that the car is not a Lemon with design or other fundamental issues that might not ever be resolved.
It WILL depreciate from the day you buy it.

Or

You can buy a good example of an older model, tried and tested, with a sound reputation.
Sure, 'this' and 'that' that will need attention, but you can be pretty sure that transmission won't grenade at 50k.

With JH's home, I don't see problems. I see areas that need attention! If it was fundamentally BAD, it would have gone under the wreaking ball sometime in the 50's.

My 'gut feeling is that JH is the type of guy (and I REALLY mean no offense here) that may tend to over-analyze things a little.
Where as I tend to use the KISS mantra (perhaps to a fault)

Each to his own.
 
Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit


Not to mention that many houses of that vintage are in tightly packed, less than desirable inner city neighborhoods where no one in their right mind would want to own a home or raise a family. Those neighborhoods tend to attract those who can't afford anything more modern, and have to settle for a vintage house (and claim they live there because it has character).


Wow, quite a stretch there, especially coming from someone who lives in the boonies.

You might want to cut your commentary where your knowledge ends instead of making yourself look like a fool. You have a lot of good input but sometimes it is just beyond ridiculous and pompous as can be.

Im sure you may not do it in your lifetime, but as others have said, these "finished" basements are still an experiment in what is growing behind whatever else, so should the house be imploded when someone decides to update yours? How about all the stuff that when that time comes will be "substandard" to folks in the future? Im sure you didnt pour true high-psi water-tight cement, so Ill venture to guess that you havent a clue what is growing in dark nether-regions of your basement. And Im also positive youre lying if you claim that your home has needed no upkeep or repairs in the 20 years youve owned it, and Im sure it will need plenty more in the future. So what else is new?

Perhaps something that an old 70+ year old who never had kids wants is not what an early 30's person with children wants? Ever think that some of the stupidity that was created and sold by your generation might not be desirable to everyone? Im pretty sure that a lot of substandard mods that were done to not just homes but also most everything else, were implemented by people of YOUR generation, not mine. So share your knowledge and stop implicating your own kind for their practices.

Now back to the regularly scheduled discussion...
 
Originally Posted By: expat

My 'gut feeling is that JH is the type of guy (and I REALLY mean no offense here) that may tend to over-analyze things a little.
Where as I tend to use the KISS mantra (perhaps to a fault)

Each to his own.


No offense taken. This really couldnt be simpler... things degrade over time. Things change over time, things get upgraded or adjusted over time. Some parging coming apart (Ive seen that to be the case on jobs done on 10 year old homes too, though aparently nothing ever breaks or degrades in Iowa, LOL) is a cosmetic thing, but given interest in humidity, possibility for mold growth (yeah like that's an old home phenomena, lol), etc. just figuring what is best practice to do.

Im sure folks who specified homes 20 years ago had to figure that out too... And those 20 year old "best practices" are now obsolete in some ways, BTW. But Im not finishing my basement anyway. Dont care to. I just want to fix the cosmetics and do whats notionally best, whether that is, which could be to leave well enough alone, could be to just pull the old stuff, could be a variety of other things.
 
My ten year old home is likely going to have to be underpinned next year. Technical points: The portion of the yard to access it is permanently inaccessible by any wheeled or tracked vehicle.
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Again, this is primarily if re-parging or some other newer best practice is the best way to ...

If you go to the video section of Ask This Old House, and look back through the archives, you'll find an episode where Tom Silva 'reparges' a section of an old basement stone wall with a homeowner. Just might be the thing you're looking for.
 
Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit
I suppose if you look at the average tract home then you might have a point. But there are plenty of high quality newer homes out there, many with plenty of character.

Back when we used to provide the capital to a team that did house flipping we got to see some things in both older homes that would simply leave me shaking my head. Occasionally a vintage house would have pine floors like yours, but they were laid directly on the joists-no sub flooring (substandard even when it was built). Unless some serious modernization has been done, homes of that vintage rarely have any insulation to speak of, the windows leak, there is asbestos, and old cast iron sewer pipes fail and leak. They have knob and tube substandard wiring, wet basements, failing plaster ceilings that were covered over with those awful little 12 X 12 acoustic ceiling tiles, tiny little garages, horrid white aluminum siding, and the laundry list goes on. To top it off you have 80 years of DIY repairs that are often marginal at best and frequently substandard themselves.

Not to mention that many houses of that vintage are in tightly packed, less than desirable inner city neighborhoods where no one in their right mind would want to own a home or raise a family. Those neighborhoods tend to attract those who can't afford anything more modern, and have to settle for a vintage house (and claim they live there because it has character).

To each his own, but both vintage and modern homes have their advantages and disadvantages. My personal preference is our almost 20 year old custom home, designed by us for us. But you are certainly welcome to your vintage home, with its wet basement/disintegrating parging issues. I'll enjoy our fully finished, waterproofed walkout basement and I can spend my time doing things other than fretting over home repairs.


I agree with the paragraph of yours that I highlighted.

Many years ago, my sister and I bought a tiny (1134 sq ft) little house in Queens, NYC, that was built in 1927, and is perfectly summed up by your paragraph. It was on a 3k foot lot, and all the houses that were jammed on the block next to it were identical in every way. I believe it was one of the Post WWI housing boom neighborhoods. If I lived in that house any longer, I was going to rip out the wiring room by room, and rebuild the whole thing, adding insulation, and getting it up to modern standards.

Then my wife and I bought our previous house in Arvada, CO, it was built in 1984 on a 3800 sq ft lot, and was considerably better condition than the house my sister and I bought in NYC, but it still needed work, plus it had a whole new slew of design issues.

Yes, it had much better insulation and wiring, but it had two floating concrete slab floors that were poured onto Colorado's famously expansive clay soil that was never properly prepared for a concrete slab to be located onto it. So we had a house with cracked and heaved floors, and with the neighborhood having been improperly setup for water drainage, the first couple years that we owned it, we had water intruding into the basement during the spring snow and rain season. We also had to replace the walkway and driveway, since they had cracked, shifted, buckled, and all sorts of other wonderful adjectives.

I don't even want to talk about the house I grew up in, in Queens Village, NYC. It was built in 1925, and the oil furnace and steam pipes were all wrapped in Asbestos. That place was a mess.

The new place, which will be completed soon, may not meet JHZR2's expectations of a nice home, and that's fine by me, as it's being built to my wife and I's specs, and our desires for a nice new home.

Just a crawl space under the house, for starters.
No concrete slabs, other than the garage and driveway, and the soil was properly prepared this time around, we made sure of it.

Every house purchase is a learning experience.
JHZR2 is learning how to perform repairs on a house I personally hope never to have to learn. I learned how to install windows, level door frames, add insulation to walls, and rewire bedrooms in my two houses so far. I almost had to learn exterior siding, but found a contractor that did it for dirt cheap instead.

BC.
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit


Not to mention that many houses of that vintage are in tightly packed, less than desirable inner city neighborhoods where no one in their right mind would want to own a home or raise a family. Those neighborhoods tend to attract those who can't afford anything more modern, and have to settle for a vintage house (and claim they live there because it has character).


Wow, quite a stretch there, especially coming from someone who lives in the boonies.

You might want to cut your commentary where your knowledge ends instead of making yourself look like a fool. You have a lot of good input but sometimes it is just beyond ridiculous and pompous as can be.


JHZR2,

Pop Rivit isn't actually wrong in his assessment.
Some areas of the country are exactly how he describes.

Personally, you couldn't give me a Brooklyn style Brownstone. Not a project I would ever want to tackle in this lifetime, or the next. I'm not sure if you would find it an interesting home to own, but others certainly do.

Everyone here lives in different areas of the country, so, please, there's no reason to claim he, or anyone else, has no knowledge of what he's talking about, when we both know that his example can and does apply to quite a few areas of the country.

It doesn't apply to your house, or my house, but that doesn't make him wrong, in this instance.

Good luck with your house, by the way.
You should post up pictures of the situation you're talking about, so that we can all get a better idea of what you're working with.

BC.
 
I found the best way to treat the problem you have is from the outside. Applying coatings to the inside help a little but the truth of the matter is the moisture/water is migrating from the outside in. Fixing cracks on the foundation can help, there are companies that pump a compound in the ground alongside the foundation which swells and fills cracks and voids. I've seen it trenched and resurfaced from the outside as well.

Sometimes it is as simple as fixing visible cracks and making sure the earth around the foundation is pitched away from the house, and the concrete walkways are sealed where they meet the foundation. Coatings can also be applied to the outside exposed areas of the foundation to waterproof it.
 
Originally Posted By: expat
I have to disagree here. I honestly have seen more catastrophic problems with houses UNDER 30 years old than with those over 80.
Most of those problems have concerned Mold, Rot or insect infestation. Cracked foundations are very common.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_condo_crisis


Looking at your link, sounds like major design issues, placed in a part of the world with weather patterns that just made things so much worse.

And yes, there are plenty of houses built in the past 30 years where you had all sorts of factors that made them bad choices. Chinese sheetrock is a great example.

The great thing is that some builders learn from their mistakes, and produce superior houses as time goes on. Others, not so much.

Personally, I'm glad houses are built differently today than they were in the 30's, 60's, and 80's.

BC.
 
Originally Posted By: Bladecutter

JHZR2,

Pop Rivit isn't actually wrong in his assessment.
Some areas of the country are exactly how he describes.

Personally, you couldn't give me a Brooklyn style Brownstone. Not a project I would ever want to tackle in this lifetime, or the next. I'm not sure if you would find it an interesting home to own, but others certainly do.

Everyone here lives in different areas of the country, so, please, there's no reason to claim he, or anyone else, has no knowledge of what he's talking about, when we both know that his example can and does apply to quite a few areas of the country.

It doesn't apply to your house, or my house, but that doesn't make him wrong, in this instance.

Good luck with your house, by the way.
You should post up pictures of the situation you're talking about, so that we can all get a better idea of what you're working with.

BC.


If you would read past posts and volleys, youll see that there is a trend of personal attack on things that others (e.g. myself) do. Its not unique to this situation here. Folks like Pop have tons of great experience, and a lot of viewpoints that I agree with 110%. I welcome technical discussion, but I dont need thinly veiled, passive-aggressive commentary to be told how horrible my stuff is and why Im making excuses to live there as a response to a technical question. That 70 year olds try such things is beyond me...

Lots of folks like the nice inner-ring suburbs where there are well established small towns that are nice and convenient. Often there are better school districts, better jobs, better opportunities, and more convenience, if one is smart about traffic patterns and the areas they live. Some places may not be like that, others are. I grew up in one outside NYC and live in one now outside Philadelphia. My choice, my wife's choice, and we DO prefer old homes. I agree that I wouldnt want to live in an inner city (just like I wouldnt want to live in a new spec-home, or even many of the newer and nicer $500k-$1M "custom" homes that I have been in), so a Brooklyn brownstone may not be a project Id tackle either. But lots of folks do, and they can be worth millions of dollars. And there are enough folks that want to live there, or nicer suburbs, which is exactly why simple economics dictate differences in home values and everything else.

So, back to discussing items of value? Even new custom homes need upkeep, modifications, upgrades and repair. So, how about discussing that instead?
 
Originally Posted By: demarpaint
I found the best way to treat the problem you have is from the outside. Applying coatings to the inside help a little but the truth of the matter is the moisture/water is migrating from the outside in. Fixing cracks on the foundation can help, there are companies that pump a compound in the ground alongside the foundation which swells and fills cracks and voids. I've seen it trenched and resurfaced from the outside as well.

Sometimes it is as simple as fixing visible cracks and making sure the earth around the foundation is pitched away from the house, and the concrete walkways are sealed where they meet the foundation. Coatings can also be applied to the outside exposed areas of the foundation to waterproof it.


Thanks!

We never have any standing water inside. Concrete below 5000psi or so isnt waterproof, so there will always be some chance for moisture and seepage.

For the cost of excavating and all that, I could install solar panels and run dehumidifiers non stop for "free".

Im not really worried about the moisture, its really more of a consideration for re-doing the walls, because whatever I put up will have a chance to trap or transmit moisture, and so best practices come into play. They are changing in time, but a lot of finished basements from the last 20-30 years have had wrong and obsolete practices and now have mold, even if they followed the best advice of the time.

So I may as well do it right if Im going to do something... And these non-breathing panels that seem to be current best practice seem suspect to me...

The pump in the ground chemicals you mention are interesting... I suppose that makes sense, but I also have to wonder if that stuff is toxic and gets in the water table and all.
 
Originally Posted By: Bladecutter
Originally Posted By: expat
I have to disagree here. I honestly have seen more catastrophic problems with houses UNDER 30 years old than with those over 80.
Most of those problems have concerned Mold, Rot or insect infestation. Cracked foundations are very common.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_condo_crisis


Looking at your link, sounds like major design issues, placed in a part of the world with weather patterns that just made things so much worse.

And yes, there are plenty of houses built in the past 30 years where you had all sorts of factors that made them bad choices. Chinese sheetrock is a great example.

The great thing is that some builders learn from their mistakes, and produce superior houses as time goes on. Others, not so much.

Personally, I'm glad houses are built differently today than they were in the 30's, 60's, and 80's.

BC.

I think a well built and maintained house of almost any era is usually perfectly livable. Like anything, house technology is always a balance of initial cost to purchase and install, maintenance needed, aestheics, and longevity.
Alot of my friends have bought 70-100 year old places primarily for location, and they seem to be doing OK with them. No finished basements in any of them but they knew that going in.
I do wonder though if any of their house insurance would cover the actual replacement value to rebuild the same house? To build their houses now using the same materials and design of the past would cost atleast twice as much as modern materials house. Some of them would probably have $40-50k in trim alone in 2000-2500 sqft house.
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2

The pump in the ground chemicals you mention are interesting... I suppose that makes sense, but I also have to wonder if that stuff is toxic and gets in the water table and all.


Do you know how far down your water table is from your basement?
I know that I have a report from my house project that tells me were it's at.

BC.
 
Originally Posted By: Bladecutter
Originally Posted By: JHZR2

The pump in the ground chemicals you mention are interesting... I suppose that makes sense, but I also have to wonder if that stuff is toxic and gets in the water table and all.


Do you know how far down your water table is from your basement?
I know that I have a report from my house project that tells me were it's at.

BC.


I know that if I look down in my sump hole, depending upon how much rain there has been, there is 1-3" of water in there. The sump pump never cycles.

But I suspect it is about 2 feet below the poured floor.
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
If you would read past posts and volleys, youll see that there is a trend of personal attack on things that others (e.g. myself) do. Its not unique to this situation here. Folks like Pop have tons of great experience, and a lot of viewpoints that I agree with 110%. I welcome technical discussion, but I dont need thinly veiled, passive-aggressive commentary to be told how horrible my stuff is and why Im making excuses to live there as a response to a technical question. That 70 year olds try such things is beyond me...


I have seen that in other exchanges, but in this instance, I can't say that I saw it.
It's possible he's laughing his [censored] off at my inability to see his attack, but, I guess I'm fine with that if that's the case.

Originally Posted By: JHZR2
So, back to discussing items of value? Even new custom homes need upkeep, modifications, upgrades and repair. So, how about discussing that instead?


We can do that.

My '84 house needed new windows and doors, and I went with Pella products.
I find them to be a great product, and a good price point, value for the features.
Pella 350 series for all the windows, and Pella Designer 750 series for the French Doors that I installed to replace a really bad slider door.

I wish I could have chosen Pella products right off the bat with the home builder.
Instead they are installing Atrium products, which aren't bad, but eventually, over time, I will replace them as I see fit.

If we had kept the house longer, we would have replaced the 3 skylights with brand new versions of the Velux units that were already in place this year. The skylights were originally installed in the mid 90's, and one of them had a seal failure between the panes of glass and the interior of the house. Thankfully it wasn't between the glass and the exterior of the house.

We miss the custom stone floors from that house.
Previous owner was the person who installed it, and even ran the electric heating coils under the whole main floor. All I had to do was install a new heating controller for it, and it was simply fantastic.

We also had to replace the water heater and the ac unit, as both of those went south.
Just normal stuff over time. The water heater was actually a Montgomery Ward unit, from the early 90's, and it was replaced in 2009.

Again, I never have disputed that modern homes need repairs, or design corrections.
I'm just grateful not to have to expend as much thought into it right now as you currently have to.

Didn't mean to start a new vs older home debate, though that is a bit fun, when people are doing so in a friendly way.

BC.
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
demarpaint said:
So I may as well do it right if Im going to do something... And these non-breathing panels that seem to be current best practice seem suspect to me...

The pump in the ground chemicals you mention are interesting... I suppose that makes sense, but I also have to wonder if that stuff is toxic and gets in the water table and all.



As I stated, the of non breathing panels in an application like yours sounds like a recipe for disaster. If I was considering buying a house with such installed, I'd want to see behind it before committing.

The pump in chemicals sounds a little like the Damp treatment I had done to my first house back in the 70's in the U.K.
It was very effective, but nobody considered Toxicity back then

Men were Men in those days.
wink.gif
Click to expand...
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2

The pump in the ground chemicals you mention are interesting... I suppose that makes sense, but I also have to wonder if that stuff is toxic and gets in the water table and all.


As far as I know, which is what a basement waterproofing contractor told me, is the chemicals they pump into the ground are safe. Basically it was 50 lb bags of some specialty masonry product mixed with water, IIRC, its been a while. This guy would dig a trench about 2' deep [where there was dirt], then pump the stuff into the ground a few feet and work up, then fill the trench and grade it. Concrete walk ways he'd drill through the concrete and pump it in against the foundation, then fill the hole. It was similar to a termite treatment. We'd follow them up, prep the area, and apply Peel Stop to previously painted basement walls and coat them with a latex paint for masonry surfaces. If the walls weren't ever coated with anything we'd use Drylock or something similar. They also use French wells if it was bad enough, and install pumps with battery backup units thanks to Hurricane Sandy.

What people fail to realize a coating like Drylock works best on walls that were never coated, once they were coated a latex masonry paint is actually better.
 
Originally Posted By: demarpaint


What people fail to realize a coating like Drylock works best on walls that were never coated, once they were coated a latex masonry paint is actually better.


Very true. As far as I know, Drylock type products state that on the product as well.

I know many years ago in our first home, a ~1000 sq/ft brick ranch, we developed standing water on the basement floor that appeared to be coming from a crack in the poured concrete wall.

Not knowing how to deal with it, other than running my outside downspouts well away, grading, etc, I hired a basement waterproofing outfit that's been in the area for decades.

First thing they did was pop a hole in the floor to access the interior drain tile (clay pipe). It was plugged. The tech smashed/dug out a foot or so of the clay pipe and flushed it out to the sump pump.

Next, he drilled a series of holes up the wall and pumped a pudding like "grout" from inside-out. Some of which even seeped up above grade outside. He then filled and sealed the holes with foam plugs and calk.

He then applied a ~4'x8' plastic panel to the wall with adhesive, such that the panel extended well below the floor, so that if any water came through, it would be routed to the drain tile.

Replaced the section of drain tile, filled the hole with gravel and re-cemented the hole in the floor.

That one repair was a good $500, 15-17yrs ago.

JHZ- in your case, given everything sounds structurally sound, and previously coated in something, I'd paint with a quality exterior grade latex, be sure to keep the grading and downspouts correct and keep a dehumidifier down there.

You know and understand the range of corrective actions that could be taken. IMO, any basement is eventually going to take on water. Nature of the beast.
 
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