We've had lots of small, necessary, mostly boring projects so far.
Our first major step towards getting our basement finished was getting
the drains installed in the floor, along with a big new well and grinder
pump. We needed a total of four drains - one for the kitchen, one for
the sink in the bathroom, one for the toilet, and one for the shower.
One
of the difficulties in getting the plan right was the number of
obstacles in the way. We had to account for the pump and the connection to
the sewer (located in the center of the bottom wall), the four windows on that side of the basement, one of the
poles holding up the house, and the electrical panel (located on the right wall). We also wanted to create a plan that made it possible to build a master suite in the future if we decide to rent out the home in the future as two apartments.We had many
versions of the layout before finally coming up with a workable plan.
Though we do a lot of our renovation work ourselves, this was certainly a job we did not want to tackle. This work was too integral to the basement's function,and to hard to remedy if incorrect. We took this opportunity to finally join Angie's List, and hired Olis Construction to do the work. We picked them because
they were fine with just doing one piece of what will be a much larger
project, allowing us to decide what to tackle next and when. Other
contractors wanted us to do the entirety of the plumbing at once. Additionally, Mark Olis was polite, fast, and reasonably priced.
On
day one, Olis and his assistant arrived in an unassuming pickup truck
and got to work breaking up concrete. Lots and lots of concrete. The
well they put in was 3 feet deep, so they also had
to dig out for that. The ditches they cut out were much neater and narrower than I imagined. The jackhammer was exactly as loud as I imagined.
On the second day they laid the drains.
