OP Ceramic tile is horrible in a basement The concrete floor surface us often uneven and ceramic tile would crack quickly. Use a product such as linoleum or another pliable flooring material, such as vinyl. These are petroleum based products and are more expensive than ceramic tile in many cases. Let's hear it for the ghetto trash who are smarter than Ms Ceramic |
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Humidifiers are not enough because you really need to dry out the padding under the carpet.
You may want to get a water-flood clean up company involved. It will cost you a lot less then getting new flooring. If you want to address it yourself, wet-vac to get as much water up as possible. Put as many fans as possible pointed on the carpet. Many places will rent special fans that blow are a long the ground. If the carpet it is really soaked, you can pull up a corner of the carpet so circulation can get underneath. The carpet is pretty easy to re-install. Keep the dehumidifiers going and make sure you are emptying out the water often. Keep drying the place out as long as possible (I would do it for a couple of weeks), even after the carpet is dry because you want to dry to walls and pads. If possible, I would turn on the AC to further dry out the air. You can shampoo the carpet, but you will be adding moisture, so I would wait until everything is really dry, shampoo, and then restart with the fans and dehumidifiers. |
| Speaking from experience, you need those industrial grade fans and a professional company that specializes in flood clean up. Even doing that, we opted for new carpet. |
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| You really need to get hold of a product called Freshana Organic Solutions. Hate to use the phrase miracle worker but it's amazing what it can do. |
This. |
| New carpet. |
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We ripped out the carpet and the padding, mopped the cement floor with bleach, tore out the baseboards, cut out and patched any bits of wet or mildewy dry wall, and tiled the whole floor so we never have to smell that awful smell again. Oh, and my dh did a lot of back breaking labor to redirect water runoff.
That was after two big rains one summer, the smell so bad it permeated the entire house. I had a bit of relief in our bedroom for some reason, so that's where I ate my dinner several nights in a row until we had a chance to tear it all out and start over. If we had the money, I'd definitely do a heated tile floor, but a cold tile floor is still way nicer than yucky basement carpeting. |