prairie fire
And now for part 3 in my DIY Saga…
Since the basement carpeting was destroyed after the two washer floods, it became quite obvious it needed to be removed before a serious mold infestation developed. Besides, it was kind of crappy carpet anyway and the dog had peed on it a few times already - so we weren’t exactly sad to see it go…
The annoying thing about this situation is that it messed up our plan of using the basement as a TV room - but in the end, that may have been for the best. Once we removed the carpet, the place immediately smelled better and the air felt better. Our guess is that the carpet was beginning to mold or decay or something before we even bought the house. It was just sitting directly on the cement - no pad or sub-floor or moisture protection or anything. Given the uneven nature of the old cement floor in the house, it was kind of lame anyway. 
Our basement is quite moist - even before the plumbing incidents - so I don’t think it was a very good idea to have carpeting sitting directly on the cement like that. Even more fun is that the carpeting was laid right over an old floor drain that was in the middle of the room! I was wondering why the washer water seemed to “dry” up so quickly considering how much there was - it had drained out beneath the carpet! Of course the carpeting retained a huge amount of it, too…
The basement also had an old drop ceiling that we didn’t like very much. There’s not a lot of head room down there as it is and the drop ceiling only made it worse. As an added bonus, they installed lighting fixtures that hung below the ceiling even though they had plenty of space above to use recessed lighting! So after we tore out the carpet, I got into a destructive mood and removed the ceiling. It turns out there wasn’t any real reason for the drop to be as low as it was. In fact, there was really very little above the ceiling in that section of the basement to begin with. I’m toying with the idea of dry-walling it like you might do an upstairs ceiling, but I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with that idea. I did some googling and found a rather nice-looking ceiling alternative called CeilingLink which some guy makes and sells online. The drop is only 1 inch and it can use standard 2×2 or 2×4 tiles. It looks like an awesome solution, really.
So the basement project has become a rather large endeavor. In addition to the TV room idea, we also wanted to build in the aquarium and an iguana enclosure into the basement wall that runs down the middle splitting the finished from the unfinished half. That’s a huge project all by itself - but now we need to build a sub-floor, install carpet, and put in a new ceiling too. It’s crazy. Totally crazy…
The ceiling would probably be the very last thing to go up. I’ve read online that some people are pretty happy just tidying up the wires and pipes and stuff and actually painting over everything with a flat black to hide it from the eye. That’s certainly a real possibility to consider as well - not to mention being a whole lot cheaper - and a new ceiling could always be added later when more money presented itself. We’ll see.
In the meantime, we’ve moved our TV up to the living room and it’s suddenly about a million times more comfortable to sit down and watch a show. The carpeting is nice, the room feels good, etc. It’s going to make it that much harder to want to finish off the basement - but I still think it’d be awesome to have a real, dedicated TV/theater room along with a sort of animal-display wall. Hopefully we can get it done someday even though it’s a pretty small space and a very huge project.