Basement Part 2 - To Grind or Not To Grind

Prior to this project, our basement To-Do list looked like this:

1. Remove nasty old black baseboard trim and carpet remnants
2. Remove old rusty carpet staples and nails from the stairs
3. Paint walls with white primer
4. Install new baseboards and trim
5. Remove old paint from masonry wall
6. Paint masonry wall with Drylock
7. Install Flooring
8. Paint walls their final color
9. Redo stairs
10. Replace door and windows

Time for Projects #5 and #6!

This is a time I will say without a doubt, "Bobby was right. I was wrong."

When we began discussing how best to remove the old paint from the maisonry he suggested a paint remover. I was wary of fumes, especially since we had just adopted a lil kitty cat, so I wanted to physically remove the paint. I had seen some videos online of people grinding paint off similar surfaces with a hand grinder so I thought this would be a good option.

Well...

It may be a good option if you:

1.  Have incredible upper body strength
2.  Are familiar/comfortable with grinders
3.  Don't care about saving money
4.  Don't care about spreading paint dust EVERYWHERE
5.  Don't care about projects taking forever

So...

The reasons we needed to remove paint from the walls in the first place was:

1. The paint was hideous, stained, and flaking off from previous water intrusion
2. DryLock needs to have direct contact with a surface in order to do its water sealing magic

This is the wall we would be working on. Most of the past water intrusion was towards the bottom and in the far left corner (it appears like the previous owner had tried bleaching or painting over that area, cute).

At least we were somewhat prepared for the air quality concerns we were about to create! We wore long sleeves, gloves, bandanas, goggles, and lead-paint quality respirators.

After some moderate grinding

After A LOT of grinding

 We realized fairly quickly that this was going to be slow going and not a one-day job. Bobby is much stronger than I am, but despite that he was having a hard time gripping and keeping control over the grinder with all the friction that it created. Plus we were creating an indoor dust-storm with sparks flying at eye-level from the friction - all quite unnerving if you're not used to it! Our basement looked like a scene from Pompei after a few hours (yes, that's a dinky bedroom fan - we had the basement door open as well).

We decided in the end to concentrate on the areas with the worst water intrusion since drylock would only work its magic if it had direct paint-to-surface contact. So we got the corner done and called it quits. 

Can't wait to clean this!

We ended up renting the grinder for two days from Home Depot. We bought 3 different attachments, including the diamond grinder which we ended up having to use. The other two were vastly cheaper than the diamond one, so our hope was to try the two out and return the diamond if either cheaper on worked. They worked, but oh-so slowly. It would have taken weeks using them. In the end we used the diamond grinder which was close to $80 and we couldn't return the other two since they were used. So much for cost savings...

We also bought a shop vac, because dust.

The flip side of all of this though is THAT IT WORKED!! The wall looks fantastic and we have had several heavy rains that have flooded areas of Nashville (and our garage at times) but not a drop has made it into our basement.

So was it worth it? Ehhhh... my mind has a creative way of quickly blocking out back memories. We love our basement wall, but if there were were a cheaper, quicker, easier, and less messy way of doing this I would certainly opt for it if we had to do it over again!