Since it's taken me so long to finish my basement, over the months I've started receiving email from strangers who came across this website in search of home improvement tips. The biggest question I always get is, "Did you insulate?" I can finally answer those emails with a big - YES!
I have two different types of walls to insulate. Interior and exterior walls. The interior walls (shown to the left) are insulated simply to reduce noise transmission. Since I'm planning a home theater right next to the furnace and water heater room, I didn't want the noise to interfere with the theater. The exterior walls require a vapor barrier.
I discovered early on that no two people will give you the same advice on vapor barriers. Do you place the vapor barrier on the inside or outside of the studs?
The main concern is that you don't want the insulation to get wet from condensation. This can cause the studs to rot. For this reason, I made the decision to use a product called ComfortTherm, which is R-13 insulation completely encapsulated by a vapor barrier material. I figured this way I would be covered either way. The bottom line was, I'm not too worried either way because the basement is very dry.
Another small project involved insulating the soffits. This was primarily to help reduce the noise in the basement from traveling along the ductwork to the rest of the house. I'm not sure how much this will help, but I figured it couldn't hurt. For this I just used the pink, Styrofoam-like material (shown to the right). Using some spare ComfortTherm, I also insulated the sides.
The image to the left shows two of the longer walls with the ComfortTherm insulation stapled up. One interesting thing I discovered was that putting up insulation is like a test-run for hanging your drywall. You have to make sure that all of the wire, both low and high voltage is completely done.
Speaking of drywall, you'll notice in the picture to left there are 60 sheets of it ready to be hung. That's 3000 pounds of drywall. Luckily I had help carrying it into the basement.
