And it's tink, tink, tink, tink; tink, tink, tink. Hi-ho, hi-ho!
I think that chiseling away at CMU walls for the past three days has perhaps driven me slightly crazy. Ok, maybe the "slightly" part is me just being charitable.
We may have officially moved past the "cleanup and remediation phase of our basement work and into the "renovation" phase, since we are now dealing with fixing issues that have nothing to do with our sewage backup. As anyone in the building industry knows, you will always encounter more things to fix than you are aware of at the beginning of the project. In this case, it was cracking in the cinderblock walls.
We bought some quick setting patch compound. This compound required that we chisel out the cracks to prepare for for using the compound. The shape required is sort of like a dovetail so that the compound will have more adhesion. The problem with this is that it's very hard to chisel out a shape like that with an overhang, without breaking the overhang off accidentally. I did my best to at least keep an overhang on one side. The spot where Scott was chiseling turned out to be the worst. There was just a thin veneer of mortar, with a huge cavity beyond.
Next, it was time to fill everything with the patch mortar.
We have opened up the storage room and made it much more useable. Scott also installed electrical in the room and two new lights.
As you can see, it's quite open now.
As soon as the patching was finished today, I started resealing the walls with Drylok where the patch was already dry from yesterday. The gallon did not go anywhere near as far as paint would because it is so thick and the walls are so uneven. Every mortar joint had to be painted with a brush. That gallon is gone now, and I will have to head back to the store tomorrow. Hopefully, we'll be ready to move stuff in there in a few days' time.
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