Creation of a new Homeworld

I've moved, and need to make my basement into a game and studio; I'm ready to have one for the first time in three years.  There was an office in the basement, but mold had gotten into the insulation, the walls were moldy and flaking off.  I decided to rip most of it out, and start over.

First job was to remove some of the mold that had grown in the corners.

Other minor patches of mold.  Repeated spraying with mold-killing compounds did the trick.

The mold remover at work.

This is what the walls look like all over.  Efflorescence seeps through from water.  We'll work on the outside of the house maybe next summer, but this year I'm gonna seal all this up.

This is the office with the back wall torn open for exploration.

Attached to the office was a closet which happened to be built like a bomb shelter.

This is the basement wall on the left, and the closet wall on the right-- before demolition.  I had already removed the carpeting and pried open the safe on the floor.  The "Hammer of Thor" on the safe is my old stone-carving hammer, a really useful tool in the project.

A view from the bottom of the stairs, the closet on the right and the office through the door.

The rear right corner of the office.

Demolition begins.

The water meter.  A good amount of corrosion and deposits.  Note the yellow plastic sheeting covering the wall.  This was laid [b]behind[/b] the studs and against the concrete foundation.

A good example of what I was up against.

Moisture trapped between the plastic and the concrete walls.  Note that this was during that one point during the summer of 2012 where it hadn't rained for months in Wisconsin.  As dry as it could get, but there was water behind the plastic.

Much of the construction was bizarre conglomerations of scrap wood and various materials.

The walls mostly stripped of the material.

Some old window sash parts used as framing material.

The pile of trash.

End of day one, there was so much fiberglass floating in the air it looked like it was snowing in the camera flash.

Day two I took out the closet, and it opened up the whole space.

Some of the remains of the closet, greenfield cables hanging from the ceiling and D-Company case in the background.

The demolition complete, was now time to move appliances into a pile and clean the basement for painting prep.  Note the patched concrete walls behind me, they were fuzzy with efflourescence (or however you spell it).

The basement view from where the closet once stood.

I went around the perimeter of the basement walls with a scraper blade on a reciprocating saw, exposing water seepage and loose concrete.  It took me a day-and-a-half to clean up after this procedure.

The old fridge, washer and dryer, stacked where the closet once stood.  The office door still hangs where the door once was.

My friend Joe comes over with two cases of Drylok waterseal (the oil base!) and some floor paint.  We begin coating the walls.

Respirators were mandatory.  This is the office, note the water inlet to the right.

Where the washer and dryer once was...

Around the toilet (it works, still) and the water softener.

This is the finished wall, pitted but sealed.

Then, the floor paint!

The office corner after being painted.

Where some mold once was.

A particularly bad area, where water would seep through the wall.

Finished floor.  This is the future game area.