Nothing like a global, once-in-a-century panini to get the basement whipped into shape. Especially since it’s been functioning as Patrick’s work-from-home office and my gym for over a year now. Anyone familiar with finished basements know there are a few considerations to keep in mind. The main one is the possibility for moisture, whether it be a heavy rain that raises the water level over the basement waterproofing or excess humidity simply from the nature of it being a basement. Both these aspects helped tailor our search for basement flooring.
Supplies
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The Process
The basement originally had carpeting, but after multiple water issues we had to remove the carpet and the pad underneath. Once we had the water issues repaired, we were hesitant to put more of the same back down in case we had more issues later. With the possibility for needing to replace parts of the carpet if there were future issues had us considering carpet tile. However, not all carpet tile is suitable for basement flooring. We knew we would need a commercial grade office building type flooring. Cringe. I definitely was not on board with making it look corporate in the basement. That’s when Patrick found a grab box option of carpet tiles and used Google Sketchup to show me a neat herringbone pattern to up the ante on the character of commercial flooring tiles.
Before installing the carpet, we had to change the dingy tan wall color. The paint color picking took on quite a few iterations. Starting at Rainwashed and Sea Salt, worried those would read a little gray or sterile in the lighting, we moved on to some colors with a bit more pigment. Next set of colors were Aloe and Blue Peacock, but we thought those might be too much. Finally, we settled on Quietude and Slow Green for our samples. Lighting changed these two colors a lot when we put them on the wall in the basement. We had thought our choice was going to be Slow Green, but Quietude looked better in the room — calm and soothing. Slow Green was reading a bit too hospital green in the lighting. All of these colors are Sherwin Williams, of course.
Installing the tiles were pretty straightforward. We started the installation in the center of the room at the doorway. The biggest thing to keep an eye on is to keep checking that the tiles are level and straight because small issues will compound as you go. Each tile has three strips of industrial adhesive tape and there is a small window to reposition the tiles, but after about 20 minutes the adhesive is pretty set and you’ll need to add more adhesive. We liked the Loctite Power Grab tube, which has a lever on the pressurized tube making application a breeze. The adhesive was good for the small pieces around the edges of the room, too. Cutting the tile was straight-forward process using the Multi-tool. We also use the multi-tool to undercut the door trims so we could minimize the tedious cuts on the carpet tile.
The final steps were to install quarter round and caulk the trim. Patrick painted all the trim before installing and using an pneumatic nail gun made installation go extremely fast. I included the baby wipes on the tools list intentionally. When it comes to caulking, there’s a lot of clean up and baby wipes help make this process pretty painless. Apply a bead of caulk, run your finger over the bead, wipe excess on baby wipe, and use the wipe to tidy up any extra caulk on the project. Game changer!
Cost Breakdown
Carpet Tiles $338.93
Caulk $3.82
Quarter Round $16
Construction Adhesive $10.26
TOTAL $369.01