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Do any of you having stamping studios in your basement? Mine is a finished basement with knotty pine. Its not wet but is damp. When the idiots who owned the house before us finished the basement they closed up the two windows on the back of the house. These provided cross ventilation. I would love to use our basement as a studio as its huge! but had tried once before and my paper started smelling musty. I have a dehumidifier running but it's not a really big one. Anyone with any suggestions or who have overcome the problems with stamping in the basement, I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks in advance.
Do you have a central furnace system? if so run the summer fan... it circulates the airflow. Also, fans in the basement to dry it out. Finally... try to store your cardstock in a sealed container... and you can always toss some of those silica packets that comes in purses, shoes etc inside the containers to keep moisture at bay. I need to take my own advice!!! I too have a basement, and need to find storage boxes for my paper... to add silica to so it stays less humid.
Our furnace is 23 years old (on our list of things to replace in next few months) but I don't think it has a summer fan. The guy who comes to clean it has never said. I did just buy a circulating fan and someone said to try kitty litter. I will show pics when it is finished. Thanks for the advice. I would love to see your pics too.
My stamping lair is in our basement and no knottty pine....painted white concrete walls for me. A large dehumidifier runs full time, air conditioning vents are opened for this area, and a floor fan for those really humid days. I like it because I do laundry and can stamp between loads. Someday, sigh, a real room in the real house.....jml
I'm in a finished walkout basement. So far so good but it is open plan to the rest of the house so plenty of circulation. I do find my paper seems more damp than when I was stamping in my bedroom so I just blast it with my heat tool. I have heard of people storing their cardstock in gallon ziploc bags with the silicon packs.
My stamping lair is in our basement and no knottty pine....painted white concrete walls for me. A large dehumidifier runs full time, air conditioning vents are opened for this area, and a floor fan for those really humid days. I like it because I do laundry and can stamp between loads. Someday, sigh, a real room in the real house.....jml
Must be an Indiana thing! I stamp in my basement - white concrete walls, dehumidifier, fan - the works - same as you! I stamp between laundry loads too! For me, the biggest challenge : keeping finished cards in the basement (on display). As humidity goes up, stickiness of glue goes down. I've switched to Tombo multi and redline almost exclusively now. But I love the space!
Can you open up those two windows again??? It might be worth it in the long run. Your stamping stuff is not the only stuff that will be affected by the humidity/dampness. So will carpet, books, curtains, furniture, etc. It will all start smelling musty.
Sounds like you need to invest in a larger dehumidifier or get a second one to supplement the one you have. My room is in the basement and I'm on the Atlantic Ocean so summer humidity is a big issue here as well, although it doesn't get as hot here as it does in Toronto, for example. I have a forced air furnace but it doesn't have a summer fan and I don't know of anyone else in my area that would have a summer fan on a furnace, it wouldn't be a standard thing in Nova Scotia as far as I know. Most of our houses wouldn't have central air like other areas of Canada where the head and humidity is higher. I pretty much run a dehumidifier constantly from May to October and try to open the basement windows to let fresh air in on "dry" days but hubby tells me I'm defeating the purpose of removing moisture with the dehumidifier if I'm letting new damp air into the room. My machine is an older model so it doesn't have an electronic display to tell me what the moisture content is in the room. While I'm not getting musty smells in my paper, I can feel a difference in it when using it on humid days. It is almost like it is thicker, maybe swelling a bit from absorbing moisture. Sealing it in an airtight container isn't an option at this point. I also run fans to help circulate the air in the room. I sort my laundry on the floor of carpeted recreation room and if a load doesn't make it in the washer right away, I can feel a slight dampness on the carpet where the pile of clothes had been setting. We try to keep as much stuff up off the carpets as possible so air can circulate.
When money starts falling from the sky and into my hands, I would like redo our whole heating system along with installing a proper venmar system to circulate and clean the air in the home, and/or put a heat pump in so I could have some A/C on the rare days that is needed. Better yet, I'd love to win enough money to build a brand new home with all of the bells and whistles of today's more energy efficient homes. My house was built in the early 1960s when a lot of today's standards were not in place.
__________________ Leslie Harnish
Sambro, Nova Scotia
Canada
Thanks ladies for the suggestions...we do have two dehumidifiers and a just bought a circulating fan. We were thinking about reopening at least one of the windows (the other one is blocked by a patio the people who owned the house before us put in.) My son has decided he will take over the basement as his room as he can st it up like a studio apartment (the finished part of the basement is huge.) I am going to take his room, which is really 2 rooms as we knocked out a wall between a really small room and a 10 x 10 room to make it larger. I never thought he'd want to switch. I'm going to love his space, it has a walk in closet and another bigger closet and is about 16 x 10. My son has already finished painting the basement (something I was only able to do in bits and pieces as I work full time and go to school full time) and threw out a lot of stuff we'd been storing in there that wasn't needed (like priority mail boxes I've had for a couple years.) I've very proud of him for the effort he's making but now I'll have to paint his room as it's gray and navy!
Stamp Studio in Basement
