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Building a Basement Rec Room

Ryley builds out a rec room floor in the Plymouth house. Ryley explains how to keep the room from being damp. Ryley puts down 4 mil plastic then 2 by 4 pressure treated sleepers, to create a sub-floor base. Between the sleepers is rigid insulation then finally plywood is installed on top.

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Building a Basement Rec Room

computer-generated transcript - may not be 100% accurate

" This is gonna be a fun project down here because I think all of these [unk] were designed with a recreation room in mind."

" Absolutely, yes."

" Yeah."

" Thought this would make a great spot down here."

" What's the ceiling height in here?"

" This is about 7 feet, 7'4"."

" 7'4". Good, plenty of headroom."

" Yeah."

" And I guess plenty of light and what's it look like? Is it a nice dry room."

" Oh that's great. It's got good ventilation and it's a nice, dry foundation. We know we've got terrific soil outside. No spot No indication of clay in anyway."

" Yeah, sandy soil means it perks and the water just filters right through."

" It goes, it goes right by"

" Yeah, and"

" And of course, it's gonna a room of about 24 by what?"

" 24 x 20, going in this direction here."

" There's plenty of space in here for ping-pong table, [unk], kids parties, etc."

" Oh yeah, it's right [unk] finished."

" But anytime you're gonna develop a basement, one of the big concerns is damp, and one"

" Yeah"

" of the best ways to really make sure that you don't have any damp coming through is to use some polyethylene sheets. This is 4 mil."

" 4 mil poly, right."

" You just lay it out so that it will overlap by about a foot and you could very neatly tape it with duct tape I suppose. I don't think we're gonna bother because we have such a dry cellar, but it's still a good idea to keep condensation from ever coming up through this lot."

" Oh yes, yeah."

" Yeah. And once you've got that in place throughout your entire room, you're ready to start putting down, what do you call this again?"

" These are slippers, we're using pressured-treated 2 x 4s and that'll go down right on the flat. And so, we'll put them on the flat around the whole perimeter of the room. Gonna come to me Mark. There is it."

" And these can be nailed with concrete nails."

" Yeah."

" They can be put down with a power nail which we have here."

" Let's see how tough it is to nail one with the concrete nail Mark."

" Okay."

" Okay, I'm gonna show you how easy it is to get one with the power nail. "

" You do need a license in order to do that, right?"

" Yeah."

" Or you could use concrete nails like this and you could try, but sometimes, sometimes you're just not gonna get in there [unk]."

" Well, so this has been cured now for about 17 years, so that makes it all that much the more difficult."

" Go ahead, well you do it your way."

" You walk [unk] Now, one of the advantages of putting them on the flat is that you're conserving headroom, and whatever you're working at the basement, we wanna have as much headroom leftover as possible. The reason we lay everything out on 16-inch centers is 16 is a multiple of 48 and of course the sheets supplied were 48 inches wide."

" Exactly."

" 4 X 8."

" Alright, now this rigid installation that we're putting in, in between the slippers [unk] at any rate, 1-inch thick, will give us an R value of 10 if we have 3/4--inch airspace next to it. All I have got here is about 12 inch, but that's pretty good, and now, we'll put these throughout the entire area. Alright, this is underlayment-grade plywood. It's nice to pull that in one side, but the other side is really full of nuts. Of course, renting a nail gun that pops somewhat like that is gonna make it go that much quicker, but to recap what we've done, we put in polyethylene for our moisture barrier then we have the 2 x 4 slippers, creates a grid, and then in between the slippers we have rigid installation and the plywood and we're ready for carpet."

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