Basement Laundry, Part IV: Transitions

A week ago I wrote about cleaning the basement floor in preparation for paint.

In the days following that purge, I put space heaters inside and outside of the laundry room, to dry the floor and bring it up to temperature. I also caulked all the larger cracks in the floor with a cementitious masonry caulk.

Let me tell you something, masonry caulk is not easy to get out of the tube. That stuff is thick. Or maybe I was doing something wrong, but it sure gave my grip muscles a work out. Or, as I like to call them, my ice cream scooping muscles.

By the way, when looking at that picture, do you see what I see? Because I see sparkles!

After the caulking was down, I waited. After three days, the floor was still damp at the edges and the caulk was still tacky. Hyeseung and I took our shoes off to enter the room, and we worked on painting the walls, the porous, dark, wood walls.

Then, on Sunday it rained. It rained enough to fill the corner of the bed of my truck. See, I wasn't thinking and I parked it on a downhill, and when it started raining, I didn't remember to move it to an uphill so the bed would drain.

Taken Tuesday. By then it had frozen solid.

I mentioned, in the post about the basement shower, that the brick walls in the laundry room are water damaged. They still are; and we haven't fixed the root problem yet. We have a whole plan for digging them out and fixing the water problem. But we can't do that until spring.

In terms of painting the basement floor, that means the transition from brick wall to concrete floor won't be dry until Spring.

This is about the driest it gets.

With our contractor and his assistant here working on the windows this week, I asked his opinion on painting the floor. He has advised us to simply not paint it until we have taken care of the water problem, and I think that's what we're going to do.

It's still great that we cleaned the floor, and we'll clean it again in the Spring when we tackle the wall.

Until then we'll focus on running the electrical (to do), painting the walls (mostly done), installing the window (done), and getting those laundry machines up and running.