Hi Lil Orchid Nut, If you want to have a grow room, you will have to isolate it from the rest of your house. The mold problems, and windows running with water in the winter, rotting the window sills etc. When I lived in Toronto, me and my friends who had many aquariums had the same sort of problems. My one friend had a concrete bunker for his hundred aquariums with a sealed door from the basement built at the back of his house. From the top, outside, it was his patio deck. One thing you could do is to put up a wire mesh or plaster lath on the non-concrete walls and entire ceiling and plaster it with one part Type S Lime (plaster building supply) and three parts sand. The lime based wall is a bit crumbly at first but densifies into marble over time by taking carbon dioxide from the air. Small cracks will heal themselves. Look on the net at how they construct ferro-cement boat hulls. On the bright side, you don't need that amount of strength, just to isolate the humidity, so you would need far less steel mesh. If your house has forced-air heating, you must cover up any ducts leading to or from it and provide exhaust to outside. Use an exterior door to seal off the room from the house. Additionally, you will need an exhaust fan on a humdidstat (not expensive or hard to hook up), and an air inlet either a flap coming IN from the house (opens only when the fan runs) or from outside. Be aware your fan will be sucking cold air either into your house, or your grow room, and in either case it will be expensive to heat. For this reason, as well of resons of plant disease you will find eighty percent humidity way too high. 50%-60% should be ample. 35% would even be okay. Orchids like to dry between waterings and if you use organic medium it will rot in too high humidity, killing the roots. Also have fans running constantly to circulate air within the room for reasons of plant disease. As for lighting, you may find you can pick up a few old parking lot light fixtures, or adapt them, or I might suggest Princess Auto, that sells a lot of surplus stuff, and I bought some Mercury Vapor Lamps There for cheap. Most of these fixtures will take varoius kinds of luminares (bulbs). Compare the electrical information on the metal plate or sticker that is on all fixtures to find out if it will suit your luminare. Have more than one, and have a couple of different types as they will make up for each other's deficiencies in the light spectrums. Sodium lamps are cheaper but give give a very ugly pink/orange light and the spectrum emitted is fairly inferior for the plants. I would recommend maybe a mercury vapour (cheaper, Yellowish green spectrum) and Metal Halide (more $, more blue and red in the spectrum; better for plants). Be aware that these lamps must be sheilded with quartz glass to cut down on the UV light emitted (Mostly for you, but also the plants). One storekeeper I met in your fair city who was proud of having the brightest store windows on Yonge street, had a 5000 watt metal halide lamp in his shop, and also de3adly melanoma tumors on top of his (bald) head. Those lights can cause tumors, but not, as far as I know baldness. Hair doesn't protect you, but may hide the tumors, if you have them. If it were my basement, I would dump a bucket of water on the floor, see where it collects, and put a floor drain there that joins to the main basement floor drain. If the water goes toward an interior house wall, I would recess a concrete spillway along that wall leading to a drain. That way I would not have to worry ever about water on the floor, or be careful watering. I renovated my mother's basement in Mississauga last year and was surprised to find that basement floors don't have steel in them, they break easily with a five pound sledge hammer, and only where you hit them. ABS drain pipe is cheap and you simply fill in over the pipe with rubble that you broke out, and a bit of ready-mix concrete. The whole affair scared the hell out of my Mom and contractors that we asked to quote on it (They refused), and I did it myself with no special skill in about half a day in total. I wish you all success. Best regards, Science Moose

Amity: thanks for the work to post info on faux painting! I really appreciate your comments--and those of the others with faux finish experience. I had hoped to give it a try on the basement stairwall today, but no can do. This is a "distracted day" and a "bad eyes" day* so I'm not up to the task of reading posts carefully let alone working on tiny details, but maybe by Sunday I can really concentrate on the directions for the technique and follow the links thoughtfully? Meanwhile, I'm gonna prime the metal doors in anticipation of a tan base coat, which will eliminate the "moby dicks" in the room until a final solution is chosen. Worldmom: Your situation indeed sounds much like ours. Your carpenter has a good idea and if he knows what he's doing, this is a great solution. Is your oak-faced metal door with chalkboard ready to photograph? Even if it's not mounted in room? Am eager to see edge details close up. (I had threatened to use chalkboard paint on metal door in earlier plan for the room, but the lobby has become more formal and there will be some large framed art pieces on walls also so don't want door to rival them. Have considered a mirror in the center panel, surrounded by oak frame like you're doing.) ____ Should anyone care why we're having a hard time deciding on doors, continue reading. We've got a pair of oak two-panel doors for the lobby closet bypass doors and will add a single matching oak two-panel on the top of basement stair in pocket door. These are Jeld-Wen from HD. DH feels that these compliment the "shaker" style of cabs and he just likes them. He bought them months ago so they're a given. There are actually two metal doors in lobby. The one to garage is solid, no trim, and that's the one seen from adjacent spaces including kitchen. The other leads out to front step and has built-in full-length glass with embedded blind and that can be see from dining room and deck. So, that means I've got a one-pane and a two-pane contradiction in the room already. There are 3 more doors to be purchased: two that lead to the dining room--one from kitchen and one from lobby--and one on new kitchen closet. We've anguished over the choice for the kitchen closet especially because for a while we couldn't find a louvered oak door that was affordable and that fit the pattern of the other doors. But...there's another wrinkle as well. In the dining room, we have one of the old Atrium doors (like French door but with one fixed and one swinging door) to deck. That's a pair of full-length glass doors. This style is more like the front door, if you're keeping score here. We've decided that the two doors into the dining room have to match that style, so unlike the two-panel ones nearby, we'll have two full-length matte glass doors on the routes to dining room, one a pocket door and one a hinged one. Plus, we've finally found a manufacturer that carries oak louvered doors in two-panel and one-panel styles, so we're dithering about whether to spend the money for them instead of the cheaper "hemlock" one in the Jeld-Wen catalog. The company with the new choices in oak louvered doors is Stallion doors. Louvers, matte glass, oak. Haven't finished comparison pricing all these doors, but the cost is steep. We couldn't possibly have afforded an oak firedoor as well. We're throwing out a plain oak hollow core pre-hung that's left over from old kitchen because it won't match anything else, so we're eating the cost of redundancy also. And, as I said, we donated the old oak firedoor before we knew we could have reused it. AARGH! [*Yes, I do have bad eyes days. Has to do with muscles of eye and close focus and prisms. I have 4 pairs of glasses and switch among them looking for a good match, but some days, sigh, nothing works. Distracted days are another matter. Nothing to do with physiology.]

from what they told me mine is insulated. I think I may have found the problem though. I originally pulled the insulation from the sills and used the cut-off pieces of 2-in pink foam board I glued to my walls and trimmed and stuck them in the sills and then put the insulation back. I noticed above the door though but below the sill is this huge gap that was blocked by what I believe to be a radon pipe. I spray foamed the hell out of the gap and it seems to have dramatically cut down on the cold air coming through.

Hi there, please take a look at this variation of your floor plan. I moved and rearranged the spaces to fit your goals in a more organic manner. This design increases the footage of the house slightly. The guest bedroom now has its own bath. It shares pipes with the boys bath, reducing costs. The boy's bath is oversized to accommodate more than one person at a time. I moved the living room to the side of the garage. This allows for a partially secluded space that fosters relaxion and conversation and is shielded from the main entrance. Visitors at the front door see the dining room (not the living room) which is usually a tidier space. I would try to place large pane glass windows or floor to ceiling panels on the dining and living room walls facing northeast. I made the cooking and meal space the center of the home to reflect the reality that this is the core of a home. I did not include windows. You can do that since you know the site and the impact of the weather patterns in your region. I will carve some time and make for you a 3D rendition of the spaces so you can see the flow and character of the spaces. Notice that the front entrance is shielded by side walls and it is close to the mudroom with an aim to promote quick access to supplies and items stored there from both the entrance and the garage. There is also what seems to be empty space between the dining room and the kitchen. This space is very important for it allows the house and the furniture to breathe. Also, I gave the stairs a bigger presence in the house. Narrow stairs that are hidden away foster disunity and effectively hamper proper supervision of the basement space. The area in pink is an additional mudroom that adds storage space to the trimmed down garage, access to the east yard, and evens out the side of the house facing the street. I also added a suggestion of an entryway treatment. I hope this helps.