My memory must be failing me. I cannot remember if I ever shared the lovely thing that was found under the basement bathroom’s vanity when it was ripped out by the demo people. If I’m repeating myself, ignore me. When they pulled out the vanity, they found quite a bit of mold growing on the bottom of it. This vanity was on the corner of the bathroom that abutes two exterior walls.  It did not have a sink; it was a “dry” vanity per say.

After the walls were ripped out, there was some insulation laying in that corner that had plastic backing. It was left there for several days and one day I decided to clean it up a bit and lifted it up. I wasn’t expecting to hear the insulation dripping when I lifted it, but that is indeed what I heard. There was around a quarter of an inch of standing water in the corner. Keep in mind this corner was completely dried out after the initial water damage, so it had formed from something else. Being these basement walls were more for holding the house up, and never really intended to be used as living space, my first guess is it was seepage through the walls.

I was stuck. As seen in a past post, I’ve been putting up foam boards over the concrete to prevent this type of issue in the rest of the basement, but the bathroom is already framed in. So it impossible to get foam boards put behind them without ripping them out entirely. So my first option was to put the insulation back in for a while, and deal with it later. Obviously extremely far from ideal. After pondering it for a while, I had one of those light bulb moments. An old high school friend of mine does insulation for a living, mostly the foam insulation. So I called him up to ask him if the stuff would seal up the walls, which is said it works great for that purpose. In fact, he was driving around town and was only a few blocks away so he stopped by to look. After telling me what it would cost to get an inch of insulation sprayed in (around R7, which in combination with the fiberglass R11 that will go in, it will be R18), I jumped on it. I was expecting $500+ as I knew the stuff was quite expensive. He gave me a friend discount (free labor) that was less than half of that.

So two Saturdays ago, he came over with the huge truck (26′ all dedicated to the fancy foam equipment… supposedly worth well over $100k) and a buddy and they had the bathroom sprayed and cleaned up in less than an hour.

Sorry about the first few pictures being so dark, I didn’t realize how bad they were until they were shrunk down.

If you are ever considering doing this, I *highly* recommend it. Right before he sprayed, I went through and scraped off all the loose paint and found a crack in the foundation that I have a feeling was the source of the water I had found. When my friend showed up, I asked him if I needed to seal it up before getting it sprayed, and he said that the foam will completely take care of it by itself.

Since I have a bunch of foam board left, I’ll probably continue using that until I run out for the rest of the basement as it serves the same purpose, just doesn’t work quite as well. Once I run out, I’ll probably have this stuff sprayed in the remainder.

By the end of the week, my lovely foam will be hidden hopefully for decades to come.

Since I’ve been lacking on the posting and picture posting recently, I thought I’d give you an outdated update.

Did I mention we found mold? On this wall right here:

The poly was put up to keep it from being disturbed. The guy doing the drywall said that it would be easier to put up new drywall than to patch up the stuff that was there, so I spent an evening tearing it down. 75% of the way through, I happened to look at the lathe in front of me. It all had a shade of green with black blotches here and there. Ughh, mold. I stopped there, grabbed a spray bottle with some bleach in it and wet the areas exposed down and called it a night. The company that did the initial water cleanup came in and took down the rest of the drywall and had the drywall guy put up the poly until they could bring in the big guns. This was a Friday. On Monday, a guy came over with a pump sprayer with some nasty chemicals. Our drywall guy ended up leaving early that day as his nose and ears were burning after smelling the stuff all day. I don’t blame him, it was pretty wicked.

Here is the chimney side:

If you look close, you can see the location that the stove’s exhaust used to be on the chimney about a foot and half below the ceiling (that little white circle to the left of that middle stud).

On this wall, you can see where the plaster was yanked down that I believe I mentioned in a previous post:

It was in pretty bad shape, the contractors were wanting to just put a layer of drywall on top of it, cutting the height of the trim around it in half. So I volunteered to take down the only plaster left in the room. On a different note, the paint that is falling off in the rear entry way looks like a flying bird…

Now, we found a really interesting thing when taking down a lone piece of insulation:

There is a little door, all framed in above the ceiling. This happens to be in our son’s closet, under the carpet and linoleum. Any guesses on what this could be? My best guess is just a place to hide valuables (house was built in 1928 – a year before the stock market crash).

Stay tuned for post-drywall pictures and more information about our basement bathroom!