A Crack

It looks like we may be headed into a warm spell after today!  That is exciting for a few reason, one that I won't have to bundle my children up anymore, and two because then we can start doing somethings to the outside of the house.  There are a few major projects that depend on the warmer weather so things are going to start happening fast and furious as we see the temperatures rising.  Today though, we are back in the basement talking about some big projects happening down there.

With the possibility of having french drains placed in a large portion of the basement, we needed to take up the existing vinyl tile floor before we started.  This was quite the job.  I had originally thought we would do it ourselves, but I'm really glad we didn't.  It would have taken us forever and we just don't have the time.  It was money well spent.

Besides not liking the tile, we had a rather large problem - as in a crack problem - that needed to be addressed and really could only be fixed with the tile gone.  

All basement floors have cracks in them.  If you have a basement, take a look, there is sure to be a crack or two.  Most of these cracks are small and expected as the floor expands and contracts and the house settles in after being built.  Small cracks are actually a good thing, larger cracks are not good things and depending on where they are can be a big deal and cost you lots money.

When we first moved to Missouri and were looking at houses we almost bought a house that had a HUGE crack in the foundation wall.  I wish I had a picture because it was the worst I've ever seen and I'm surprised we even considered buying that house.  A professional company had come in and fixed it but it was still quite the sight.  

The crack in this house is/was big but it was in the slab, not the foundation.  I've learned over the last few weeks that the foundation is actually the 4 outer walls your house sits on and the slab of your basement floor is separate from those walls.  They actually don't touch.  In our case, the slab crack ended up not being a big deal structurally, except for in a few places I will show you, and we got the ok from a structural engineer that we were good to go.

In this picture below, the crack is clearly not visible.  The tiles masked it pretty well.

Once the tile came off, it was clearly much more visible.

Houses can be funny and unpredictable.  The slab to the left in the above picture is one of the most level basements one of my contractors had ever seen.  The slab to the right however, slops off at about a 1/4"of an inch every foot.  That clearly creates a problem when you want to lay a new floor down.  

With the drop-off being that extreme the best thing to do was to level it out as best we could and then mask it with flooring.  There of course are other options, but that's what we are going to do.

Here are pictures of the floor after it was floated out.

Let's hope this does the trick.  It will be nice to get the flooring down.  I will blog about picking that out tomorrow.  It can be so hard to make decisions like that, especially when under a bit of pressure and on the fly.  I'm happy with my choice though and think it will look great.  See you then!