Basement renovation progress
I finally got around to leveling the kitchen floor. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to do it, other than wanting to make sure I did it right. The floor is sloped down a bit into the bathroom area, and the place where the kitchen sink cabinet would go is about an inch and three-eighths below the surrounding area on one side. So what I began doing yesterday was leveling the floor an inch on that side, and allowing it to gently fill the slope to a flat, level surface.
I’m using leveling cement to do the job. I’ve placed painted pieces of wood all around the edges of the area I’m going to fill, to make it easier to remove the pieces once I’m done. The wood pieces are from three-eighths to a half an inch thick, to allow plenty of expansion room between the leveling cement area and the wall studs. I’ve already primed the area using the recommended latex floor primer, and the next step was to mix up the cement and pour it out.
While waiting for the primer to dry, I also did some water system maintenance yesterday by changing out the carbon filter. I do that about every three months, and it was about time. I would have done it the other day with changing out the sediment filter, except that we had run out of carbon filters and therefore I had to go to the store to get some. So that’s another project done.
The cement took a long time to dry, being down in the basement. The temperature was above 50 degrees F as recommended, but the floor must have been a bit cool for it to take so long to dry. I need to do another layer or maybe two, since one bag only went up half the necessary height. Today I will go to the store to get more leveling cement and finish the job hopefully tonight or tomorrow, by the time it dries.
More to do in the kitchen area
Once the cement gets fully laid in the kitchen area, there is an area I need to do in the ceiling above the future sink cabinet. Then I think I will proceed to tiling the area. Actually, I think I might do the tiling first, so the floor will still be nice and clean. The ceiling work might leave some mess but not a lot to pick up off our new tiled floor. Then the sink cabinet will go in roughly, as I need to mark where to make the cuts in back for the plumbing. Then I will need to paint the sink cabinet, and it will be ready for installation!
There is a lot of work yet to do, but finishing up the kitchen area will represent a huge amount of progress. We’re thinking of using the kitchen area as another workspace for now, leaving out the stove so we can put another, more useful, countertop by the window. We will still have the refrigerator and a microwave for food and cooking, and the kitchen sink for washing dishes, so it will be a mostly functional kitchen space. But for now I think we will leave the stove out because it takes up too much space in the small kitchen area, and we already have a full kitchen upstairs.
