How to finish your basement and avoid toxic MOLD problems

how you doing I'm Sean McVeigh with Sean's outdoor adventures and most people know me from an outdoor related channel on YouTube which has archery hunting fishing outdoor stuff but what a lot of people don't know is that I graduated with an environmental degree from Penn State many years ago and I actually used to own my own mold remediation company which means I essentially tore out finished basements for a living let me explain why and let me talk to you a little bit about alternatives and approaches to finishing a basement that will help prevent you from destroying the value of their home by having a huge mold issue on your hands so first of all problems begin when we take traditional building materials such as wood studs and drywall and put them in a basement environment the reason is basements are prone to moisture and mold and when I say moisture I don't just mean standing water Moisture can also take the form of humidity humidity in the air is moisture that is in the air that can actually give mold the the moisture it needs to grow on organic material so that's why we avoid wood studs in the basement environment as you can see in this project I've studied this out with metal studs metal does not have organic material and so it cannot provide food for the mold to grow on another advantage here is if there's ever a situation where and there's an unexpected flood in this basement and you have standing water the metal is not going to soak up moisture like wood will and wood will rot once it gets wet like that now picture this this is a this is the foundation wall right here and once this is all drywall or paneled or the surfaces put on here we no longer have access to the foundation wall and we don't have access to the back side of this sheathing whatever we use and so if there's a humidity issue mold can begin to grow on the back of this and that can begin to negatively impact the air quality in your home and mold can cause allergic responses and immune responses so some molds are toxic and that means no matter who you are if you are exposed to the mold spores that they are letting off in the air you can have an immune response you can get sick headaches bloody nose runny nose things like that there are other molds that will simply cause an allergic response in some individuals so you could have ten people in a basement and three people start sniffling and sneezing and it's because the mold growing there is causing an allergic response in three of those individuals and not the others however we want to avoid all molds so let me talk to you a little bit about a strategy for finishing a basement if you need to and in this situation I have a growing family and we have run out of space I wanted to avoid putting a room in the basement just because I know there are potential issues but since we're in a situation of need and we can't afford to move going ahead and building the room but taking every precaution necessary so as you can see I started off with using metal studs as opposed to wood studs the cost of a metal stud right now is around a little over five dollars these are 20 gauge studs and the equivalent for wood studs would be around 250 to 3 dollars so you're spending more for the studs right now but if you put the wrong materials in your basement and you go to sell your house later on and they find it here serious mold issue you are going to cost yourself tens of thousands of dollars and hurt the potential value of your home by having the wrong materials down there if they're getting moisture and mold growth I also want to clarify something here and I'm going to turn the camera to do so now a couple years ago I built an addition on our house and I left the crawlspace underneath the you know the bathroom so that we could have access to the plumbing if ever need be now I'm holding a wood stud right here this is approximately five feet off the ground if you picture moisture in a home a lot of times it's standing water on the ground and we are five feet away from that - traditionally speaking a wood stud is going to be compromised when it's in standing water or excessively high humidity so usually if you have standing water you also have excessively high humidity I run a dehumidifier in our basement throughout the summer and keep the humidity at or below 50% as long as you're at or below 50% there's usually not enough moisture in the air that will give mold a chance to grow also it's a lot harder for mold to gain a foothold on a wood stud with humidity as it is like the backing of drywall that papery substance on drywall is so much easier from old or even paneling you'll see mold growth on walls way before you'll ever see it on a wood stud so in this scenario I have a wood stud here for framing it out to give myself access to the crawlspace in the future but I used wood here because and I'm showing you this because in this situation I feel confident that it will be totally fine I'm going to show you something else here I have several inches I'll give you a side view of this so here you see I have several inches between here and the wall and as you look down one of the reasons is I have this cement block bump out right here I don't know why they did that and I needed in the design I wanted to clear that before the wall turned so I just gave myself all this airspace and I'm gonna have a dehumidifier set up on the ground right here and what it's gonna do is it's gonna draw any humidity from behind the wall this way so picture this for a minute imagine that air is a sponge now a sponge if you put a sponge in water that water wants to go up through the pores of the sponge and goes all the way up through the sponge even though the bottom of it is all this in contact with the water the reason is wet seeps dry remember that phrase wet seeks dry now when you have moisture in the air in the form of humidity on this side of the room if I had to dehumanize and the humidity is being drawn down to 40% and all the way on the other end down here if it's 50 percent relative humidity down that end of the room that's gonna be drawn this way and let me show you walk down here and I want to show you this now here's my bump out from this angle and you can see there's an air gap here right here there's there's an air gap all the way down and then throughout the wall all the way down here I've left several inches of air space behind the wall what this air space is going to enable me to do is draw all the humidity out from behind my wall and keep my project safe from any kind of mold or mildew issues here's another thing I want to point out what I've seen in a lot of the basements that I've torn out is they put a vapor barrier of plastic lining on the backside of the stud and then they put that up against the wall people have thought oh I want as much space as possible I'm going to put it right up against the wall now they've cut off their ability to draw the moisture out from behind the wall and moisture can come up between the studs inside the wall cavity and mold can begin to grow from the humidity on the backside of the wall so my point is that design is not effective and see there's a membrane or a paint type substance on this wall of waterproofing whatever and I'll talk more about that in a few minutes but what I've found in a lot of situations is the plastic up against this causes that there was condensation and moisture that got back in there and there was growing all over this material I always discourage people from using this type of stuff on a basement wall it does not solve a moisture problem and although a lot of them say they do and the anti microbials in these coatings break down over time now when I used to have my own company there was a company that was producing this this stuff at the time that I was a installer for and working with it over the years I was like this stuff is definitely different it was instead of just oil-based and other chemicals they actually use clay particulates that kind of wove together what in one of when it was installed and they also offered at that time a lifetime warranty which was unheard of in the industry and because I you know had when I sold my company which by the way I sold because its health that you your health is getting impacted when you're working in that everyday even with the respirator suit and everything else I was getting sick all the time and it's just I didn't want to it wasn't worth me shortening my life by so many years just to make money I was like oh I'll do something else so but anyway I had the stuff left over and I didn't originally intend to finish the basement so I just put it on here to make it look brighter down here but it's been on there for years and you know it's holding up fine and with the way I'm designing this and I'm drawing all the moisture out and I also don't have a moisture issue coming through the wall it's going to be fine and the reason I don't have a moisture issue coming through the wall is because I regraded everything around the house so that sloped away from the house I put in drainage systems to take all moisture away from the house from the outside so if you have downspouts and this is a common issue in the corners like here's a corner wall back here there is a downspout there but there's no moisture or or issues on that corner because I have the downspouts directed about 20 feet away off the side of the property there so basically you never never never never never try to solve any kind of a moisture issue by putting any kind of a sealant on your wall what you need to do is go outside redirect the grading away from the house and divert all downspouts away from the house now I never really had much of an issue with that in my basement but I still did it anyway because I know that's the right thing to do so let me just show you what I did right here okay so this downspout starts there go underground this downspout meets up with that pipe and runs over here meets up with this pipe and all of them are directed over here this is my scrap pile from the basement project you're watching me do and those pipes go off the edge of the property over there also one thing I did was all of this is grated away from the house as I was saying and I put in a drainage pipe here that's perforated so all of the water that could come out here gets collected there brings it all in to with the other pipes and is diverted completely off the property right past my messiness that I got to clean up you'll also notice that I have one of these domes over the window well these are good to keep the rain from going down in the window well and potentially coming into the wall that way some people are in development and it's harder to divert water off your property but you have to find a way to do that you know we got out to the street or whatever so that's another thing that is really crucial is you have to have a dry basement this basement also has a waterproofing system on the bottom with a sump pump on the opposite side of the room however even though I have all that one of the designs of my system is I'm going to keep the drywall about this far off of the ground of the floor and I'll show you that once I get it installed the reason is as I gave you that sponge example a little bit ago the drywall acts as a sponge and if there's ever a water issue in this basement if that dry comes all the way down to the floor it's gonna get soaked up into the drywall and of course if it's along the bottom it's gonna be behind your trim you might not see it you're gonna begin to have mold growth now years ago when I was in the mold remediation business they were using paperless drywall which became very popular for a while and I always recommended that to people if you have access to that I encourage you to spend a little more and get it I live in a very rural area it's a mountain of sticks and they just didn't have it anywhere around here for me to get and so I the best option I could go with is the mold resistant drywall this particular kind with the low lighting you won't be able you can't see right now but you'll see the game once I have it installed it has a purple coating so what I'm going to do is I have a plastic sheeting just plastic probably I think it's 4 mil is the thickness and the thickness isn't the most important thing I mean obviously you want it to be strong enough to resist tears when you're installing it however I'm going to put it on this side of the finish side of the stud and that's gonna be right smack up against the back of the drywall and this is what that's gonna do for me is and I'll use a freezer as an example if you put something in a ziploc bag and you close it but there's a lot of air space in there you put it in the freezer over time you'll get freezer burn and that's because of the air space and the air contact and the moisture that's even in the air is getting at that however if it's vacuum sealed tight and that plastics tight up against the product you don't get that freezer burn we're not nearly as soon now picture that in this scenario we have the plastic smack up against the drywall here and it's creating that same scenario if there ever was humidity on the back side and any kind of condensation it's taking place on the outside of the plastic and not up against the back of the drywall preventing the mold from being able to grow I the formula for mold growth is food and water food and water and in the basement environment any kind of organic material such as the back of drywall wood studs that can become food and if moisture is present even in the form of humidity it can become a food source for mold okay right now I have a window in the corner of the picture here and because of how much light is coming in and I don't want to blow out that make it too bright that it hurts your eyes that's why I have it in the very edge but I'm here because I want to point something out a lot of times people in crawl spaces and finished basements or unfinished basements whatever they have windows and they think oh I'll leave the window open to let fresh air in and what you're actually doing in most scenarios is you're causing a potential mold problem for yourself here's what happens especially in the summertime you have warm air coming in and in the basement environment too traditionally and generally it's around sixty degrees year-round that's it under the temperature underground and I'm in Pennsylvania and it's that way for most of the states in this region you open that window and let's say it's 80 degrees outside the warmer the air is the more moisture it can hold so let's say you take that 80 degree air and you bring it in to sixty degree air now that sixty degrees can no longer hold the moisture and it begins to condense out if you have a glass of ice water in the summertime and there's condensation all over the outside that's exactly why because the air right around the glass is colder than the air temperature that you are living in so if it's 80 degrees outside and 40 degrees right in those centimeters around the glass condensation begins to happen and that's what happens in the basement environment that hot air comes in bit water begins to condense out because the err can't hold it and then if you have organic material down here you're giving it a chance for mold to grow on that material and in some places the the code requirements for a crawlspace is to have vents which is these people have no clue about the science of what they're doing they're basically requiring people to put a potential mold hazard in their house and so oh it you know if you live in an area that has that kind of a code requirement I would be petitioning them right now saying look based on what you just learned with the humidity and mold this needs to stop we have to take this out if there's a code requirement it should be to have a dehumidifier running in the base in that crawl space to draw any moisture out of it close up those those vents because bringing fresh air in is hurting you if you're in a warm environment with that cool space under there and so you close those up and you run a dehumidifier get the moisture out now you're cutting off the mold issue so coming full circle when it comes to the window as much as possible keep those windows closed if you do open them make sure you have your dehumidifier running on full power to draw out the moisture that you are now bringing into that basement environment when those windows are open and that's in the summertime now I live as I said in Pennsylvania in the wintertime temperatures drop and on the outside the temperature is colder than on the inside and so you know as you get into that time of year where the outside temperature is equal to the basement temperature well now you're not going to have that kind of a condensation issue because you're not having that change in temperature in this basement environment the other area that I used to make the living on was cleaning the mold out of people's attics because the same thing would happen in the wintertime now people have their heating space in their house and a lot of people run humidifiers in the wintertime because they for have forced-air heating systems and what ends up happening there is you have all this moisture in the air in the house and then when it gets its way up into the Attic the temperature drops way down and right on the sheathing of the Attic it's just like that glass of iced water and now you have condensation happening all over the sheathing and mold begins to grow all throughout the Attic I my living was made on tearing out basements and cleaning mold out of attics I even thought about getting back into business just to do attic projects because they were a little easier once you're once you get mold in the basement especially on this if you have like a coating of this type of stuff once the mold grows in there you are in bad shape I mean you almost have to soda blast it off soda blasting you think of Stan blasting that adds too much contaminants to the air but soda is basically you're blasting it off with baking soda that is the most effective way of cleaning off because you have to get the food source for mold completely off the wall and by the way I'm sorry this is becoming such a long video but I think this is education that the general public would benefit from so thanks for you know hanging in there with me so that you can learn this because your home is very often your biggest investment when you go to sell it you usually need to get a certain amount of money to cover maybe whatever's left in your mortgage or simply to buy another house and if you are destroying the value of your home because of mold in the basement or in the attic obviously you're losing a tremendous amount of money maybe your deals are gonna fall through people are gonna not want to buy it because now you're gonna have to disclose a mold issue and the value is just going to go down and down and down and down so you have to do it right okay there's a few things I want to clarify that I said earlier and I also want to mention a few other things especially regarding code I just installed a new window here there was a single pane real drafty window that had been in here from when the house was built and I just installed this one have them put the insulation around the boarder just yet but I have the insulation cam sitting here and I mentioned about you know opening the window because when like hot air comes in and cools down they the moisture comes out in the form of humidity and that can cause issues with mold later on well there are a couple occasions when a you can open the window to have air exchange and be times when you would want to have fresh air exchange I just want to clarify that so typically as I mentioned in the basement environment your temperature is around sixty degrees year-round so when the outside temperature is close to that a lot of times at night the temperatures cool off I live in Pennsylvania you know even in the summertime the temperatures can cool off you see you know do all over the grass because of that moisture can coming out of the air when it cools down so early in the morning after most of that moisture has come out of the air that would be a good time to open the windows blow some fans in blew some fans you know the air out things like that because the temperature outside is it going to be similar to what it is inside and that humidity has already dropped out of the air and it's the dew is already you know it shows us by the dew being all over the grass another situation where you would want to have air exchange let's say you have a mold problem already and you need to get those mold spores out the way to do that obviously is to open doors and windows and blow fans out while you have a dehumidifier running and because you want to try to keep the humidity down as much as possible and to get that fresh air exchange your blowing fans on high getting the mold spores out of the air because when you have a mold problem those mold spores are just trapped in the air down in the basement environment and so you want to have fresh air exchange but obviously you got to keep in mind that humidity issue if the temperature is a lot higher higher outside than it is inside you're going to be pulling that that air in and the moisture can begin to condense out or come out and so you could have an issue there so anyway I wanted to clarify that keep that in mind as you can see I've got my insulation please now when you're thinking about doing a basement project there are code requirements you have to adhere by things like having insulation currently a minimum of an r-13 value they say preferred our 19 which honestly I don't see that as personally don't see that as a necessity because the reason why the science of it is when you're when your exterior wall is underground you know that temperature is going to be fifty five sixty degrees pretty much year round the inside environment and here even if I'm heating this room it's probably going to be sixty five sixty eight not a huge temperature difference the difference comes in if this was a walkout basement and on the other side of this was open air space and let's say it's two degrees outside in the wintertime well yes I'm gonna want as much an insulation here as I can possibly have but when it's Underground exterior wall currently the the minimum requirements are thirteen I went with are thirteen and there are different choices for insulation stay away from paper backed insulation because again we're trying to keep paper products out of the basement as much as possible I went with a foam insulation board it's two inches thick with sort of like a foil coating on it this does not absorb water which is very important for this type of an environment if for any unexpected reason we ever had a flood or water in a basement let's say a water line breaks upstairs or this happens all the time people have a hose that goes to the refrigerator to get water and the hose break so now you have all this water coming down into the basement things like that so Matt let's say you have standing water in the basement regular insulation will stop up that water similar to a sponge and it actually kind of negates the ability that the insulation has for doing what it's supposed to so even with like I looked into different options like Owens Corning had a foil back you know insulation for in the basement which also was a vapor barrier which is great but you know it's still it doesn't have the same ability to repel water like something like this will so I went with a foam board this is an R 13 point one so it exceeds the minimum requirement in that regard and it the because it's a solid foam it doesn't take on moisture at all so and that's what I would want I would want something that that doesn't absorb the moisture at all so I have the insulation in place next I'm gonna hang like what I would say a vapor barrier the plastic against the studs here and then my drywall it's going to go against that a couple other things to consider regarding code is especially if you are planning to use it as any form of like a bedroom or living space you need an egress of some type a door if you don't have a door or a window that you could easily get out they make egress windows and you have to cut the foundation larger and put those in but you're gonna need that you'll need a hardwired smoke detector with battery backup as well as a carbon monoxide detector this particular unit has both built into it so make sure you look into all the code requirements in your area before you start getting into your project all right so I'm getting near the end of my project here as you can see there's my window that I was filming near before this is the area where I actually started this whole video out like I said near the end I've got everything in the flooring and I just need to put the trim around the bottom of the walls but I wanted to shoot this part of the video so you can just see how I did the walls because I talked about it before what I used was a 3-inch piece of board and I laid it on the floor and I set the drywall on that for using my spacing all around the bottom of the floor and once I put my tile floor down I still have you know about that much of a gap all the way around the floor again that's to prevent any kind of drywall coming in contact with if there was ever you know some standing water that might flood the basement for some reason that's the point of that and once I put the trim molding on the bottom you won't even see that gap at all there's a couple other things I want to mention while I'm standing here and I'm thinking this because right above that camera is I have an access sort of trap door for getting access to the plumbing of the tub above this spot in the ceiling and that's something you're required to do if you have a trap that is encapsulated in your project you're going to need to have access to that another thing I didn't mention before that I'll just mention real quick since I'm using the underneath part of the stairs as part of a closet part of the living space they require you to drywall that off and I've tried to figure out the logic behind that and the only thing that I could really come up with reasonably is that maybe in case there's nails sticking out through the bottom of the steps they don't want people getting gouged on those other than that it doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense but and you know something like that I don't personally view as a huge issue here's something to think about what the whole project is currently they don't require permits for doing a project on the inside of the house like this however they do have codes to follow now if you go to sell your house and they have an inspector look at the house before you know the sale goes through you know there if you didn't follow the codes the inspectors going to be pointing all that out to the potential buyer could that cause them to hesitate bulk or want money back from you yes that's a possibility so there's a calculated risk in how you want to handle that I encourage you to just look up the codes for your area and follow them so that's not an issue for you I also want to talk to you about flooring real quick now again we're trying to avoid moisture mold related problems in the basement environment carpet if you think about carpet I've walked in the basement even with like maybe just my socks on and I could feel the dampness in the carpet you know it's harder to keep that dry you know you have a dehumidifier running on the other side of the room it will help to dry it out but it's going to be harder for that dehumidifier to dry the carpet of a whole room like this if the dehumidifier is over there or something like that where as hard tile floor which is what I chose it's not going to have that added moisture problem we're trapping anymore you know moisture within its pores and things like that because it's not porous like like a carpet and underlayment might be also I have seen would type floorings in the basement you want to avoid those they do make specialized floorings with like cleated under underneath of it and raise it up off the floor things like that those you know you could go with I know somebody that did and it's been in their home for about 12 years now and they haven't had any problems and they've they've fortunately had a very good dry basement you can't run into problems though if you ever do get a moisture issue those laminate type floorings warp easily if they do get wet so I mean I kind of discourage them but you can go with it you know some of those specialized ones if you want like I said I went with the tile floor it's hard you know it's not going to be trapping moisture within it if I'm running a dehumidifier it's going to keep this room dry I can clean it real easy if my kids are down here even if I tell them don't eat or drink down there and you know they're going to so if they spill milk down here if that milk gets into the carpet obviously that's there you have an organic food source for mold and so it's moisture and food all in one and you know it's hard to clean that all out and get it perfectly dry real you know real thoroughly so on this type of flooring however if they spill milk it's a matter of wiping it up we're good to go and so for the longevity of the project I encourage the flooring something similar to this but obviously you're you know you can do whatever you choose just keep in mind we want to keep those organic materials off the floor as much as possible and in this case I put ceramic tiles so home good in good shape there also I want to mention this on this wall over here but on the backside of this wall although that all the electrical line was in conduit and protected still I knew if the kids were ever on the unfinished side of this wall playing around I just didn't want them falling into it having some weird chance of something that conduit getting broken open or anything like that so I had some extra drywall I went ahead and dry walled the backside of this wall I've only gotten to the spackling phase I still got to paint that but that's just a safety thing for the kids in that regard so I just throw that out there in case that's a thought for you if you have kids and you run an electric in that wall you're gonna have electrical line going through that even if it's in conduit you know it's it's easier for the kids they somehow get access to it so I just drywalled it off and again at the bottom of the wall I left a little space just the same as I did in this room here I'm already enjoying this space I'm looking forward to the final touches you know putting the trim around that far wall down there that's where I'm gonna video my ministry stuff I want to get like a nice cross for the wall you know and for a backdrop you know obviously since it's religious videos I want it to exemplify that and in the other areas of the basement I'm going to be recording some of my outdoor adventure videos like commentary to stuff in fact these two deer heads the other day just because I needed to get started and do an actual couple videos and so I'm already getting good use out of the room and ultimately that's the point we want to be able to utilize the space enjoy it and not hurt the value of our home or our own health in doing a project like this so that's the whole reason I did this video for all of you to watch I don't want you to hurt your health or the value of your home so consider these things and implement some of them in your project in order to help prevent mold growing in your home so thanks again for tuning in if you want to check out any of my ministry stuff I'll put a link to that channel if you want to check out my Sean's outdoor adventures channel with all the hunting and archery I'll also put a link for that both in the description section of this video also while I was doing this project I shot a different video called how to hang drywall on the ceiling by yourself I'll put a link for that in case you want to check that out it's not an easy project hanging ceiling drywall by yourself but obviously I did it all in it it wasn't too bad but you know you just have to you know work with what you got so thanks again for tuning in again I hope this helped and take care and God bless you

Channel: Sean's Outdoor Adventures

Views: 266,988

Rating: 4.8344154 out of 5

Keywords: how to finish your basement, moldy basement, how to avoid getting mold in your home, toxic mold in your home, finished basement projects, what is the best way to finish your basement and avoid mold problems, best basement finishing practices, Best way to add value to your home, DIY Basement Finishing tips, DIY House remodling projects, DIY House projects, DIY Home Improvement projects

Id: 94avMaUlLEs

Length: 36min 43sec (2203 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2016