Post-flood restoration complete

It has been a hectic last couple of weeks as we have been restoring our basement after the floods. When last I posted, we had just completed putting the wallboard up. The next step was the mudding and taping and sanding, a process that takes several days.

Day 1 is a real rough mudding and getting the tape up on the wallboard joints. The goals are simple: fill the cracks, glue the tape down with mud, and start to shape the places that need filling.

Just after the mudding 

Not looking too bad 

A corner that needed serious work

Mudding is boring, repetitive and dusty work. Sanding between coats is hard work, tiring and downright bad for your health, filling the entire house with a layer of fine white dust, despite having fans blowing the dust out of the house. It took four days to get all the mud on and sanded off. My mudding job was far from perfect. Several areas of my taping bubbled due to insufficient mud underneath the tape. While I hand checked my sanding, there were still places where the mud was quite visible because of a change in texture. Ah, well. It's a basement.

The next step was to put the casing back around the door frames...

21 pieces of this stuff went up

...then fill the cracks with wood filler, and sand them to make the joints "go away".

Filled and sanded

Then we laid down 136 linear feet of baseboard. Annoyingly, this stuff only came in 14' lengths, and we bought it in Calgary, so had to strap it to the top of the car and drive it home. Bouncy stuff.

That's a 14' wall 

Trimmed around the edges

Those holes in the wall are inspection ports that we cut so that we can see in behind the walls in the future. Since we found everything from pine martin poo to mouse nests back there, we figured we should somehow make the spaces accessible. It took 2 days to cut up and put down all the door casings and baseboards.

And then it was time to paint. Two coats.

Coat 1 

Not bad for amateurs 

Big walls = lots of paint

You'll notice we painted the casing and baseboard in-situ. The "right" way to do it is to paint it before installing it, but we were lazy. And its a basement.

The first coat looked OK. By the end of the second, it looked awesome (so long as you didn't look too closely). Painting each coat took both of us working together 6 hours. We opted to re-paint in a colour that was in our old house in Calgary and at the West Wing. It used to be this bright creamy yellow. Now it's a deep green, and seems darker down there. Ah well. It's a basement.

The final step was the doors. We pulled all 7 and painted them in the garage with really high quality paint left over from last year's reno, making them match most of the other doors in the house. We were running out of time with guests arriving, so opted to paint the critical solid doors to the bedroom and bathroom before they arrived.

Ready to go

Coat 1 on the solids

Once we got two coats on these, we re-hung them. After our guests left, we started working on the other 3 doors. Filled with glass, they required a lot of taping to protect them from unintentionally getting paint on the glass. One door in particular to 90 minutes to tape each side of the door.

15 glass panels, and a lot of tape 

Everyone needs a screen door in the basement

And today, I took all the tape off, spent 2 hours scraping paint off glass with a razor blade, then re-hung them.

Our contractor and our painter both dropped by this past week to see our progress. They were very complimentary about how it all turned out.

The art is even being re-hung 

A good colour combo

The water started coming in on June 19th, 40 days ago. We probably could have been put together faster, but we opted to spend time drying out, plus waited for the insurance dudes to come, see the damage and confirm we weren't covered.

Now all that's left is to claim back all our costs under the provincial Disaster Recovery Program.