Flooring

Now for the big job, putting in 1,000 square feet of flooring. For a couple years I had been keeping my eye on some new products for installing flooring over concrete. Two competitors existed, SubFlor and DriCore. These are two-foot square flakeboard pieces with plastic "feet" to hold them up above the concrete surface.

The plastic feet provide a dead air space under the sub flooring, helping with insulation. The plastic provides a vapor barrier effect as well. In addition, if a minimum amount of water should leak in, the lift of the feet will provide a place for that water to work its way to the floor drain. However, understand that we are talking very small amounts of water! Nothing is going to be much help if you have the Mississippi river coming in your window.
We ended up going with DriCore mainly because of superior distribution. When we contacted SubFlor, we learned that the product was not yet in the local Lowes stores, but would be "soon". What soon meant was not clear. When I talked with DriCore, they also revealed that the local stores did not yet have product, but they immediately put me in contact with a Home Depot in Nebraska that would ship it to me. Shipping was a little high, but I really wanted to use this since I intended to lay down bamboo flooring.
The DriCore instructions actually suggest that you install the product on the floors first, and then build your walls on top of it. That does not work well here in Colorado, since our expansive soils demand the construction of floating walls. What this meant to me was that I had to cut the DriCore to get it through doorways and such

Kind of a pain, and certainly time consuming. However, a jig saw with an aggressive tooth profile cuts both the flake board and the plastic subsurface just fine.
The edges of the panels are tongue and grooved. A simple blow from a rubber mallet would drive the panels together, locking them quite tightly.

I used a small scrap stick to keep from hitting the panel edges themselves. I figured that the blows could not be helpful for the tongues!

You can see some odd panels up against the walls on the edges of the room. The instructions called for a 1/4" gap between the edge of the drywall and the edge of the DriCore. I accomplished this gap by placing these scrap bits of 1/4" hardboard as shims.

Lights

The light fixtures that we had purchased were installed next. Here is the guest bedroom

and the bathroom

You can see that the toilet has been set and the bathroom counter installed as well. The rest of the basement lights were standard can lights.

Painting

Before laying the floor, we needed to get paint on the walls. The library was made a dark green color

while the media room went with a lighter green

Note that the funky orange color above the fireplace is not a paint color, but rather the glow of a tungsten worklight in the library. The bathroom also had a second coat put on its walls

The guest room color is peach, but there's no picture because it was getting late and I was tired of the camera.

Bathroom floor

One of the things I signed up for was laying the tile in the bathroom. Now, this was something that I had never done. In addition, as usual, I decided to make my introductory project more difficult by getting artistic and laying things on a diagonal.
Before I laid tile, I wanted to get the majority of the walls painted. Here is where my young daughters finally got to help, although we ended up running out of paint before we were done. Since it was New Years weekend the paint store was not open to get more.

I used 1/2" spacers to separate the tiles. In retrospect, I think that 3/8" would have looked better. One-half inch is just a little too wide a grout line. But, I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

I learned a lot though. Grout is hard on your hands ... wear rubber gloves when laying the stuff. My fingers had no feeling in them and it tore the skin up something fierce by the end of the project. A manual tile cutter works pretty well, and I ended up breaking only a single piece in the course of the work. However, small diagonal cuts are tricky, and tile nippers are very useful for cleaning up the bits that do not cooperate.

Framing Complete

By December 3rd, the framing was complete.
You can see through the main archway into the media room and through to the archway that opens the library.

Here we can see the framing for the fireplace. This ended up not being the final location for the fireplace. After the framing was in, Jonathan realized that the joists above were not wide enough to pass the 10" flue that the GEM-36 model fireplace required. A quick scramble led us to move the fireplace into the media room, a solution that I actually like better anyway.

Here we're looking into the guest bedroom.

Start the project

So the summer began on a sour note, I was laid off from Hewlett-Packard. But, by Fall a new job with Qualcomm was in hand, and the severance from HP opened up the opportunity to finally finish the basement.
When we built the house in 2000, we had always planned to finish the basement to provide additional living space. We wanted a library, a media or television room, a guest bedroom, maybe some storage and a shop for my woodworking. The bursting of the tech stock bubble meant that the stock options we had hoped would be available for such work were under water, and so that plan had lain in limbo. However, now we were ready.
We attended the 2004 Home Improvement Show at the Larimer County Fairgrounds, initially just to see if there were any new ideas available. However, on a hunch, I took along some of the plans we had for the basement project. There were three home improvement outfits attending, and I ended up talking with all three. Each took a copy of the plans and offered to get back in touch soon.
Jonathan Brooks with Home Improvement Express was the first responder, and ultimately the general contractor that we chose. He offered a couple ideas to refine the plans, worked with a couple of my own unusual ideas and seemed the most flexible of the three. Additionally important, he was willing to work with me providing some of the work myself. We had enough money to have most of the project done for us, but some of it would have to be DIY to make budget. I ended up taking care of:

• Painting
• Laying the tile floor in the bathroom
• Laying the flooring throughout the main living spaces
• Installing and painting the moldings