Project : Repair Cement Basement Floor And Tile
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This project was a Biggy! The project consisted of 1st removing the moldy carpeting, exposing the cracks in the basement floor to find the cause of the floors raise in certain areas. Then, we had to fix the problems. This required smashing the cement floor where the cracks are, creating a Sub Pump drain and then re-cementing the holes we created. We did this by hand! With a Sledge Hammer! - Next time we are using a Jack Hammer - This was Tough!

After the problems were repaired and the cement was redone, we redid the entire basement in ceramic tile. The tile was laid in a horizontal position :) Of coarse nothing was easy on this project - lol.

Click on the thumbnails at your right, to see the project during the before and after stages :) It took us about a week and the results are very nice :)

bougieprojects@gmail.com

Step By Step : Each Photo Explained.

01 Basement Cement Floor Repair
There are five guys on this job, and things are moving at a rapid pace. I totally forgot to take photo's of the demolition of the basement floor. This is my buddy Gilles. Here, we are applying the cement to refill the giant holes we've created to fix the cracks in the basement floor.

02 Basement Cement Floor Repair
You should have seen the water running under this cement floor. It was like having a mini river under your house! Because this house was on higher ground and did not have a sub pump installed, the water from melting snow and rain that accumulated on our friends property not only was destroying his cement floor, but the surplus water was flowing into his neighbors land causing the neighbors sub pump to always be in operation. That's why we are here :)

03 Basement Cement Floor Repair
Here's a closer photo of the hole we are refilling with cement. I want you to get an idea of just how huge the hole's we've created are. We've created two large holes in two separate rooms about 12 feet long by 12 wide. We also created a smaller hole in the basement office at around 4 feet long by about 1 foot wide. Before the cement was added, we also added a bed of gravel rock to allow the flow of water to easily reach the sub pump we've installed.

04 Dried Basement Cement Floor
The cement is almost dry. You can tell it's not 100% because it's still darker on the top. Even though we will be adding tiles to the cement basement floor, we still want the finish to be as smooth as possible.

05 Dried Basement Cement Floor
Here's a photo of room 2. All the cracks in the basement have been removed. All the soft spots have also been demolished and refilled because once your cement starts going soft, it's finished. So, instead of just repairing the cracks in the basement cement floor, we repaired all of the cement floor, soft spots and all.

06 Making The Hole For The Sub Pump
You can't really see the sub pump we've installed, but I wanted to show you the size of the hole we created to submerge the sub pump basket and pump itself. Not included with these photo's, I still have to find them - Is a trench we dug up through the front lawn, where the water from the sub pump would flow. The trench was about 30 feet long, from our friends home, to a ditch next to the main road. It took almost 36 hours just to drain all the water from under our friends basement!

07 Tiling
Like I said earlier, there are five of us, so things are really moving along :) It's thursday and we do not want to finish too late on friday, so we are working at warp speed!

08 Tiling
While I was tiling the first room, my buddy was tiling the second. The other 3 guys are handing us the tiles while we apply the tile cement. In these photo's, your only seeing sections of the basement we are doing. What you don't see is the size of these rooms and the rooms we've already done, I didn't have time to take those pics

09 Grouting The Tiles
Here I am, applying the grout to the basement tiles we've put down yesterday. While I am doing this, our team is split up in 2 groups. Me and 1 helper grouting and sponging in one room, and my partner and 1 helper doing the same in another room. Gilles - The guy in the first photo, is constantly mixing the grout to supply the two teams.

10 Sponging Excess Grout
This is a photo of my friend, Serge. His normal trade is bricklayer, but today he's not pointing lol he's sponging. His knee's are going to be killing him by the time the day is done - but wow, what an incredible worker!

11 Sponging Excess Grout
This is Coco, he is working with my partner doing the same thing as Serge. He's the kid of the team, but the first to be feeling the pain of the job :P But, he never stops and works like a machine.

12 Room 1
Well, even though I didn't take before pics of the cement basement floor, they all look the same anyhow, this is room 1 completed. We still have to comeback another day, to paint the place and add the wall quarter rounds. But for this week, that's all.

13 Room 2
Here's room number 2. What I didn't take pictures of is the office, laundry room, closets and storage room. They were all tiled as well.

14 Cement Basement Repaired And Tiled
Here's a close up of the tiles. What made this tile project a little tougher than most, aside from the size of the project, was the tiles were all installed at 45 degree angles, and the lines had to match from one side of the basement to the other. Even though we worked very fast, our line was always on the floor and our levels were always close by. My friend loved the project so much - 2 weeks later, we got called back to paint the basement and do floating floors upstairs, tiles in the kitchen and entranceway.

Below - Are a few web sites you might find interesting :)