The big adventure in our basement bathroom remodel was installing a new faucet.  Everything else for the room was pretty self-explanatory.  We had installed a kitchen faucet before, but the pop up drain made the bathroom one much more daunting.  We decided to get the Peerless Bright Chrome Lever 4″ faucet because we liked the Peerless we had in the kitchen.  It is a little more than we had planned on spending for a basement, guest, extra bathroom, but I did not want clear plastic handles.

Pop up drain instructions are confusing by nature, I think.  I read through them a couple times and laid everything out before starting to assemble everything.  As long as you do not jump into installation without going through the how-to, even the pop up drain assembly will go quickly.  It may take more time, but do not be afraid to dry fit both the drain and the pop up to see if it opens enough for your water flow – we needed to adjust ours after installation.  And it is really just not that easy when everything is already in place.  But once past that, dropping the faucet in and hooking up the supply hoses only takes a few minutes.  The faucet works and looks great, which was important since it is the first thing you see in our new bathroom.

When we were converting our basement bathroom from dingy and unusable to pretty and functional we left the corner shower in place.  It just needed a good cleaning and a new showerhead and knobs.  We really like the rain showerhead we have in our bathroom and we wanted to find something similar.  The showerhead that was there previously actually put out too much water for the drain to handle, so we also needed something that would not overflow the shallow shower basin.  Aesthetically, we wanted something that hung out into the shower a bit to prevent the possibility of leakage through the shower doors.

We decided to go with the Mini Aquafall from WaterPik.  It is adjustable several different ways, which is handy since this is our “guest” bathroom and guests are always different heights. The showerhead meets all of our quirky needs.  It installed directly on the pipe coming out of the wall with just a bit of Teflon tape.  I would not recommend using any sort of wrench on the showerhead without a rag or even painting tape as a barrier.  The finish is chrome, but the showerhead and arm are made of plastic.  This may not work for a high-traffic shower, but for this application the combination of looks and other features outweighed the material.

We have a three-quarters bathroom in our basement that has never been functional.  The walls were a dingy white and there was a 1980’s fish border.  The floor was a green and white vinyl tile.  The shower was OK, the sink was fine (even though it was not pretty), but the toilet did not work – the water would drain out of the bowl allowing sewer gas into the room.  As the opening salvo in our Operation: Basement 2009 we took everything, except the shower, out.

After removing the offending toilet the next order of business was getting rid of the old, worn glued-down tile.  We started by using a 5-in-1 tool and hammer, but it wasn’t very sturdy and didn’t get up very much tile.  We started using the Hard Cap Floor Chisel after just one frustrating evening.  The polymer cap reduced the vibrations we felt dramatically.  Since we were scraping the tile directly off concrete, there wasn’t any give and that cushioning was very important.  It was very easy to get under the tile with the chisel point.  The three-inch width got up much more tile in one go than we expected.  Of course, some times the glue prevented a larger path of destruction, but quite often we were able to get a good four to five inch wide and six inch long area up before the tile broke off.

This was quite possibly the hardest part of the entire process, but it was made so much easier by using the Hard Cap Floor Chisel.  You’ve got to work smarter, not harder!

It’s that time of year — spring cleaning. This year we decided to tackle our basement. In the interest of full disclosure, our basement was a disaster. My tool bench was littered with things that I never put away, full of random sheets of sandpaper from the more-than-you’ll-ever-need job packs, boxes of screws/nails/fasteners and, of course, larger tools that I’d rather keep indoors than out in my garage or shed.

So, as you can imagine, it was a real mess down there.

Enter the Safco Commercial Wire Shelving system.  After doing some searching around on Pricegrabber, we found a great price on this sturdy unit - under $100 for a 4 shelf capacity system.  More impressive than the sleek looks of the wire shelving was the fact that each shelf holds up to 500 evenly distributed pounds, so it passes the 2,000 pound heavy-duty tool test. At 6 ft. tall, this shelf is tall enough to store whatever you can throw at it. At 3 ft. across, it’s wide enough to hold almost all of your indoor tools, and at 1.5 ft. deep, this shelf can handle most plastic storage bins.

I don’t think I can recommend this shelf enough — Safco really hit this one out of the park!

It seems that mother nature is exacting quite a bit of revenge on the heartland of the United States these days.  With the flooding in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri hitting a little too close to home, it got me thinking about the best all-around, basement-saving device that all homeowners should have at the ready: the wet/dry Shop-Vac.

While great with the wet, the Shop-Vac is equally great with the dry stuff.  I was able to very quickly and easily keep my garage floor free of sawdust from my table saw — and with all of the various attachments, able to get into some hard-to-reach places, too.

The killer feature, though, is how this Shop-Vac easily moves water with the touch of a switch. All you need is a garden hose to attach to the unit (any size will work - I used a 100 ft) and you can eliminate the need to stop vacuuming and lug the spacious 10 gallon capacity outside to empty.  It’s time and back savings that will pay dividends when you’re faced with a wet basement crisis!

Features:

• 3.5hp
• Wet/Dry capabilities
• Tons of attachments
• Pumps out water through a garden hose
• 10 gallon capacity