It is officially slow season for me, and we are looking to "finally" refinish the basement of our FIRE house.
It was gutted last year due to a flood, but there are probably 500+ masonry nails still attached to the exterior walls of the basement. The person who finished the basement the first time nailed wood directly into the poured concrete walls versus building a framing wall. We plan to use sealing paint on the concrete walls and floors before redoing the basement.
However, before we waterproof the walls, we need to address the nails. What is the best way to go about removing them? With the nails still in the wall there is no leaking that we can see. However they are very unsafe sticking out from the wall, and make putting new insulation in problematic and seem to be a risk for leaking in the future.
Has anyone encountered this before? I've done a search, but nothing seems to address this issue very well. For rusting basement ties, they say to use hydraulic cement. I've used this before with good results, but am unsure as to the best way to remove the nails. We haven't actually tried removing any of them....because we are afraid of doing it wrong.
1) Angle grinder? If so, which size. Then use hydraulic cement
2) Pull them out with a pry bar and use hydraulic cement in each hole?
Once the nails have been removed we plan to use sealing paint as extra insurance against water intrusion in the future.
After that, we're debating the benefits of "insofast" panels vs. foam and framed walls. The main advantages to the insofast being ease of installation, mold resistance, and the floorspace loss only being 2.5" vs 4.5" in a 1,000 sq. foot area. All the walls we plan to put up are on the exterior of the house except one small section. (There is already a framed room that we are keeping the center portion of.)
The picture I attached is before the wood was taken off the wall - now the wood is gone, but there are still a bunch of nails sticking out.
With a few 4 day weekends coming up before a long 2 1/2 week time off in December, I'd like to tackle the prep work so we are ready to go when we have the long stretch of time to work on it.