Working on the Basement

We moved; you knew that. We need to use the basement for living space, and our builder wouldn't finish it for us, so I've been spending much of my spare time at home doing so myself. It's a poured-concrete basement with a slab floor. The walls are a bit rough, but not too bad, cosmetically, so we decided to "paint" them with Dry-Lok. (The idea was that it'd be much cheaper and easier than framing and drywalling it, and with Dry-Lok, maybe a bit drier as well.)

We used the "low odor" latex stuff, but even that stinks of ammonia, so it wasn't all that much fun. And it doesn't go very far, either. The packaging says 75-100 sq ft per gallon, IIRC, and I'm not sure I got that much. And it took 2 coats, then a third trip getting the bigger holes covered.

We've painted the floor with a deck enamel, and for the half of the room that the kids are going to be using, we put down an area rug. That was a breeze (after the Dry-Lok).

The floor approaches but doesn't quite meet the walls, leaving about 1-2 inches of gap, so we're painting 2x3s and gluing them (to the wall, with Liquid Nails) over the gap. They'll be behind furniture most of the time, so the fact that it doesn't look perfect (the walls aren't exactly straight) isn't a real problem.

So we're finished with walls and floor, and Saturday, we finished the trim on the kids' half of it, and set up their stuff. Pretty decent, and quite satisfying to have done it myself. We've still got to trim our half, but that'll just take another couple of hours, and we'll be ready to move all of our office stuff down there, and really, finally "move in".