Perel I just went through this with our basement remodel - Did all the possible water abatement possible - starting w/gutters/pitch, grade of landscaping, removing large bushes around foundation, putting in a new patio, dry lock painted on walls (after a good cleaning) - Floor clean then application of floor paint. When I researched about possible flooring on our refinish side - I decided I did not want any flooring where I had to wonder what was lurking or growing under there.. So an inexpensive wall to wall carpet ($250 including pad) seemed to be the answer - I purchased it knowing it may get wet & if so, I'll just throw it out - I have the tack strips on all perimeters - so it would be fairly easy to take this out & put a new one down. On the utility side I purchased a nice vinyl rolled flooring and had the floor cleaned,painted as well as dash patched for pitted areas - this would be an easy application for you - found in hardware stores just apply to pitted, unlevel areas like a cement let dry I just think adhesives will make the application much more difficult + the VOC factor - as well as difficulty removing in the event of water - and need to remove old adhesive for applying a new tile etc... Good luck

OK then! :) My stupid floors are kind of uneven, though. Does that make a difference for the engineered hardwood? I should add that although we've never had any problems, the previous HO (original HO) did install a basement waterproofing system. It could certainly have been paranoia on her part, and I've never known our sump pump to run in almost three years, but I thought I'd put that out there. Many basements in my area DO have flooding issues, which is why I am somewhat paranoid. The rest of my house is hardwood though, and I vastly prefer that. I have always hated carpet. If you know of any good deals on EH, I'd be very interested in at least pricing it out. Is it something I can install myself?

We have infloor radiant heat in our basement, as well as our main floor, upper floor, garage, front walkway and driveway. The basement is walk out but unfinished. We have never turned it on except to test it and exercise the pump. The distribution piping and the boiler seem to keep it warm enough down there. If the basement is ever finished then I suspect someone might want to use it. We live in Denver Colorado so it does get cold here some times. I wouldn't put it in based on the description of your usage and situation.

Thanks RES (I feel like I owe you a retainer at this point:). We are thinking about doing that as well, but have been taking it in steps. Essentially, the water seems to rise through cracks in the corner of this utility room wall (by the door) and then in the middle of the finished space where there is a crack down the middle of the slab. If I pump water out of this corner before it rises to the floor, things stay dry. It does seem ideal to do both trenches and then tie them together with some sort of redundant pumps. A couple things probably pointed me to this utility room first: 1 - the current temp pump system I've cobbled together (just to the RIGHT of the door in the picture) has been keeping things dry throughout, so I was comfortable with attacking that point. There was some piping laid for future radar collection under that corner and it apparrenty creates good drainage. It's hard to be confident if we do work in another location, especially after we are finding the installed sump location ineffective at collecting enough water without the drain tile installed. 2 - the finished part has new wall-to-wall (after the last time we thought this problem was solved), so it's somewhat nice not to have to pull it up to do work. 3 - the sump pit is not close to where the trench in the finished space would go. The option here only required a 15' run to the pit, so a smaller investment that might be enough. If this step didn't work, we sketched out that mid-floor trench and how we'd probably connect it to the utility room or add a second sump pit in a closet by one end of the proposed mid-floor trench. This is what raises my questions about whether all the demo work on the various walls are worth it as that is the default approach for these basement systems. I thought I was deferring that question by choosing to just do the "unfinished" space first, but it really didn't avoid the issue.