Brace the Foundation Walls

If you remember, a few weeks back, some buddies and I gutted the basement in preparation for bracing. The two long 42' walls are slowly tilting in, and one of them has a horizontal crack. Daryl from Michel Construction came in with the best quote ($4000) and came off as the most competent and thorough of the contractors I tried. His quote included 17 4” I-beam braces cemented into the basement floor and reinforced on the floor joists as well as an engineers report stating that the basement was sound. While this work isn’t exactly rocket science, it is ugly, loud, dusty, finicky work, and I really didn’t have the time to do it myself. As well, getting an engineer out to inspect before and after can be a $1000 to $2000 touch alone if you just call someone out of the phone book. Daryl knows an engineer. I sure don’t. And the report is just as valid, regardless of how much I (or Daryl) pay the engineer.

The first thing Daryl and Chad (his employee) did was create holes in the basement floor. To be up to code, the braces must extend at least 3” below the surface of the floor. I marked the hole so you could see it.

Next, they put the i-beam in place, bolted it to the 2X10 rafters, cemented it in place, and carved the crack out before filling it with grout.


The final step was to block back the brace with 2X10 pieces (seen in the picture above sitting beside the braces) and voila – 17 braces in place, and a basement that will never move again! The next step will be to draw up a floor plan, frame the exterior walls, spray-foam the headers, insulate the rest of the walls with R-20 fiberglass, vapour barrier, and drywall. This will be enough to qualify me for the money from the Energuide Grant Program. All that will remain after that is to frame the interior walls, install a bathroom, drywall, install doors, paint the whole thing, install in fixtures, trim, and install a suspended ceiling. Maybe I should have said the “next steps”…

Gutting the Basement

The Handyman's Dream is located in a neighbourhood that used to be a swamp. Seriously. In the 1960s they filled it in. And built houses. Like ours. Consequently, basements in this area shift and twist and fall apart. Floors heave. And crack. Most often, long walls get horizontal cracks like the one below -- builders weren't big on vertical rebar in the 60s apparently.

The crack above was revealed when three friends and I removed the wall paneling and drywall that adorned the two 42' walls of our basement to prepare for bracing. While this crack is minor in terms of size (some houses have cracks three or four inches wide) our exterior walls are slowly tipping inwards. The strategic placement of 4" I-beams every four feet will stop this movement. The beams are cemented at least 3" down into the basement floor and bolted into the floor joists above, creating a brace wherein for the wall to move, the entire house must implode - though I don't think it ever comes to that.

While we are taking the bracing as an opportunity to make our basement more functional by putting insulation and gyproc on the walls, the removal of the existing panelling presented us with quite a different option we never considered. Wallpaper. On the bare concrete walls. Seriously. Why not?



Here is the first bit we found. Nice. However, soon this was revealed -- not one, not two, but THREE layers of wallpaper. (You have to look very closely at the top of the photo to see the bottom layer.)

And, just for good measure, a fifth type of wallpaper (with a bit of crack thrown in...)



This discovery leaves some burning questions in my mind: Were all the wallpapers visible at the same time? Who chose them? Why? Was it once styllish to wallpaper your concrete walls? Why? Could I strip this paper and sell it at a vintage/retro building supplies store? Would it be worth the effort?

Once the bracing is done, I'll post some pictures and go into more detail about how that process works. Stay tuned!

Here's a pic of the trusty truck that was used to cart the crap away to the dump -- thought it deserved a mention. We own 1/4 of the truck, which has turned out to be a pretty good ownership arrangement - rarely do all of us need it on the same day.