looking for ideas- cheap and easy and legal insulation for basement walls.

[aemeijers]

I've probably asked this on here before, but then the weather got warm and I got busy with other stuff and forgot about it.

I have an old abandoned buried garage bay in basement, not used since they added a first-floor 2 bay garage, and filled in old garage door and driveway cut in front yard. 12-18 inches of the poured concrete is exposed above grade, so the space is cold, now that winter has returned. (Floor above and dividing wall are insulated, badly.) It is also on the damp side, but by changes to gutters and planting beds I have eliminated the actual active leaks (knock on wood.)

I would like to insulate the walls on inside, since house isn't worth digging up the outside to do it properly. Due to the dampness, I want to avoid drywall, but all the foil-face foam boards say they have to be covered by drywall. I also didn't really want to go to the expense/labor of studding out the walls. My plans were to hang foam sheets like a curtain from sill plate, with maybe a few dabs of adhesive at bottom to keep them from flapping around. But how to provide the code-required firebreak, and also provide a path for any future leaks to drain down to floor level? (I was going to hold the 'curtains' off the floor 3/4" or so.) Does anyone make foam panels with integrated firebreak? If so, are they affordable, and where can I get them?

Is there an obvious answer I am missing here? With the repairs and upgrades I have already done, I have as much money into this place as I could sell it for, under current market conditions, so I am looking to do this on the cheap. Space will be storage/quasi workshop only, so it just needs to be safe and legal, not pretty.

aem sends...

[marson]

Thermax (and no other brand that I know of) foil faced poly iso foam is rated for fire exposure.

[Jim Elbrecht]

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Marson suggested a fire-rated foam- but I have to say. . .

Isn't the first thing you're going to do is hang shelves? [especially in a damp area you want things off the ground]

Wouldn't studs make that job a lot easier? I think studs will make your life, now and in the future, a lot easier. [and it will sure look better to the next guy that comes along if you're selling in the future]

Jim

[aemeijers]

Thanks for the replies.

Yeah, if this was a proper deep bare-concrete basement, I might go to that level of effort. But I only plan on keeping the place another 5 years or so, and with my schedule, I'll never be doing woodworking tinkering projects. For shelves I was just gonna buy some used industrial metal bolt-togethers at an auction or something. There is one wood wall in the old garage I can hang shelves on as well, along with plenty of wall space in the unused rec room next to the old garage. Living alone in a three-bedroom house means you can adapt some common areas for other uses, as long as the changes aren't permanent.

If the previous owner(s) had not stupidly buried the old door opening, it would be a great place for a table saw and such. But it would take 2 people to thread the maze down there with sheets of plywood or long boards, so the use is likely to be 90% dead storage. I've had to stash my stuff in some pretty nasty places over the years, so preservation packaging is no mystery to me. (The large size old ammo cans are great for that, albeit heavy and overpriced.) If I can move the crap currently taking up the 'L' in the garage down to the dungeon, that will give a good accessible space for a small table saw (with a heavy coat of wax, of course...).

aem sends...

[Cshenk]

"aemeijers" wrote

Its really hard to answer as we dont know the code specs for your area, but i haqve an idea you could track down?

When they resided my house, there are these panels of 'blue stuff' which also provide both insulation and extra firesafety as well as water barrier. If they are legal for outside a house under vinyl, I can't see why they wouldnt be inside unless the material causes major poison fumes if burning so arent allowed inside.

They sure are easy and fast to put up and you can cut them if you need to so as to get them down there. I do not recall how they were attached to the exterior of the house, only that they went over a brick wall in someparts.