This is what the wall looked like before we started: three-inch thick styrofoam glued onto concrete, with shelves made of particle board and scrap two-by-fours. Wow. No, I’m not sure what the people were thinking when they put this up. Oh, and there’s an old green dryer too, which we still haven’t done away with. It took half an hour to peel all the styrofoam off, chip off the dried-on epoxy, and bag everything up for disposal. In the end we had something like 20 garbage bags of broken-up styrofoam that we paid a junkyard a couple of bucks to take off our hands, as well as a baseboard heater which was older than I am and ready to catch fire the next time we turned it on.

The first step towards making a new and better wall was to, ironically enough, put some styrofoam up. Much better quality styrofoam, mind you, which would be held in place by a wooden frame instead of epoxy and voodoo. In the end, we’ll have much better insulation with this inch-thick foam (and pink fiberglass insulation, of course) than we had before with the three inches of crap. Once the foam was up, and held in place with some two-by-fours, we taped the sheets together to seal the cracks between them, and then started framing up the wall with more two-by-fours.

The way the frame works is, roughly, as follows. There is a row of two-by-fours that runs along the bottom of the wall and which is screwed directly into the concrete; we drilled the holes with a hammer drill and then dropped in three-inch (I think) concrete screws. Another row of two-by-fours is attached onto that with ordinary three-inch screws, and another row is similarly affixed to the ceiling. Studs are then mounted between the ceiling and floor every sixteen inches, and also secured with three-inch screws, drilled diagonally into the horizontal supports. Finally, a firebreak is added by putting short horizontal two-by-fours in between the studs halfway up the wall, visible a couple of pictures down.

In the corners the studs meet in an L-shape with a gap in between them. For added stability and insulation, we added three foot-long blocks that screw into both sides of this L shape, and packed the space between with fiberglass, as seen here. This is strictly not necessary but is a nice touch that my father has found handy over the years. Incidentally, none of this would have even gotten started if not for him - his experience, his help, and especially his many tools and supplies which he generaly lent/gave me. He’s also considerably cheaper than your average contractor and his work is probably just as good, if not better.

Anyway, with the frame in place we can start putting up slabs of that wonderful pink fiberglass insulation that keeps out cold and makes your fingers itch. On top of the foam, stapled to the studs, goes the plastic vapor barrier that keeps condensation from forming on the wrong side of the wall when the temperature drops. As we found out in my old room back in Fredericton, putting the vapor barrier on the wrong side of the insulation generally leads to problems. Tape is used to seal any holes in the vapor barrier, for example, those caused by the cables running up into the ceiling.

And now the drywall starts to go up, with drywall screws every eight inches along all four sides and on every stud to hold it securely to the frame. We actually don’t have the drywall going all the way to the floor; it only goes down to the upper two-by-four on the bottom part of the frame. This is so we have a bit of room to play with at the bottom should we ever attempt to install a raised floor in this part of the basement (not likely, but it never hurts to plan ahead!). So to actually mount the drywall we had to shim it up with some wood scraps. Mounting the remainder of the drywall was relatively straightforward, though one piece had to be cut with a hold for the dryer duct, and that was a bit interesting. In the end it took six sheets to cover the entire wall.

Next up is the always-fun stage of mudding. We put a strip of mesh tape down each joint between the sheets of drywall and covered that with drywall mud, and also covered over all of the screw heads. In the photos the mud on the screws is white because it dries fairly quickly; the thicker layer of mud on the joints dries more slowly. We had to apply the mud, wait for it to dry, and then sand off any excess to make it as flat as the surrounding wall - rinse and repeat, and do it three times on trouble spots. While we were waiting for the mud to dry, my father took the opportunity to staple some of the cables to the ceiling which had previously been dangling at neck height (such as the power and ground for the dryer outlet).

At this point we’d been working on the wall for most of two days, and it was finally time to prime it for painting. This was actually pretty quick because we had two paintbrushes and two rollers, so my father, Kim and I were able to get the whole thing done in about an hour or so. I don’t remember the technical term for the color of this primer, but I’m going to call it “battleship grey”. I think they make it ugly on purpose so you’re not tempted to leave it any longer than you have to.

Of course, being the procrastinators that we are, it actually took us several months to get around to painting it a real color (an off-white called Rose White from the Debbie Travis collection at Canadian Tire, actually). Kim’s grandmother bought us a chest freezer as an early Christmas/wedding present, and it would have been such a pain to move it to paint the wall after it was full, so we broke down and painted the wall before the freezer would get plugged in. I did this job alone and it took about four hours start to finish. I think it actually looks pretty good!

Hopefully this will embolden us to do some more home improvement work once we have the time and the money to do so; when we end up selling this place a few years down the road it will really help to have a better looking basement without wood paneling from the 1970s.