PROBLEM CELLAR DOOR IN RIDGEFIELD PARK

MUST BE DONE BEFORE DRIVEWAY IS PAVED

We got another incoming call from a customer hoping desperately to resolve basement flooding. She first reached out to her brother, who referred my company. He had found us online, and he also contracted with us for a cellar door replacement.

 “Wait till you see this terrible cellar door, it’s an odd short size, it’s falling off the hinges, and that heavy rain we just had, well, I just had the worst basement flood in my 32 years of living here”, she said.

Upon inspection, the unit was indeed an unusual size. I couldn’t make out the manufacturer either. It was sturdily built with strong hinges, but after so many decades, the rust eventually won out. 

In this case, the Bilco was sitting in the lowest corner of the back yard, and right at ground level. Even the smallest rain brought in some water. To make matters more complicated, the foundation also had to be extended about 18”, just to fit the Bilco “O” series, which is 47” across, and projects 58”. 

I saw that if we extended the foundation out another 18”, the front edge of the Bilco would be about 2” below grade. This customer’s basement flooding problem was not going to be fixed with 4” cinderblocks, I had to go to standard 8” blocks.

Nobody has ever explained what the Bilco letters O, B, C, and SL stand for, so here’s my best guess

• “O” = original
• “B” = the second model
• “C” = the third model
• “SL” = super large

We had to do a lot of digging. Some of the excavated dirt is on a tarp, and the rest is on the driveway. We didn’t want to destroy the lawn with the excavated dirt. We wound up finding a home for most of the dirt. The neighbor next door wanted it to level out some area.

Below is the new masonry foundation, before the installation of the Bilco O. 

Before we delivered the Bilco to the customer in Ridgefield Park, we glazed it in our back yard in Maywood. That’s my wife, Jossy, doing the glazing. The commercial glazing chemicals are supplied by a chemical company. It’s far harder and stronger than any paint, and according to everything we’ve researched and what we’ve been told by the chemical supplier, the glazing is far more rust-proof than any paint. It’s similar in composition to the original glazing on a bathtub, that never rusts through unless deliberately scoured by abrasive cleaning. Nobody is ever going to scour a cellar door in that manner.

Rust has been the enemy of the cellar door industry for 100 years, and to the best of our knowledge, Confident Home Remodelers is the first installer anywhere to apply a commercial glaze to a cellar door. We believe it will be 99% rust-proof, and if any rust ever does come, it will be a tiny bit right at an edge, and never in the flat part of the product either inside or outside. We believe that the commercial glazing will outperform the powder-coated painting that Bilco provides for some of the cellar door sizes that they sell. 

We’re won’t be setting up shop for spraying the glaze until we move to a bigger and better location, so for now we are brushing it on. The glazing chemicals are a 3-part mix if sprayed, and a 4-part mix if brushed on. It smells strong, but our house in Maywood has a big side yard bordering a good-sized woods that is actually in Hackensack, so there’s no neighboring house right next door to complain. Maybe the deer don’t like it, but they are eating my beautiful woods bare, so I don’t feel so bad. I am the unofficial caretaker of the woods. I’ve coordinated or helped to coordinate several cleanup events. We watch over the woods to make sure bad things don’t happen.

We had to remove a little asphalt to install a higher row of cinderblocks. I was the one with the camera, so there’s no pictures of me, but we both worked very hard. Thanks to God the weather was great. 

The asphalt was stupidly thin, barely 1.25”, lol. It was easy to cut with a grinder, and pry out the pieces.

 

Here’s the finished Bilco. The customer will have her landscaper grade around the Bilco, because the yard still slopes towards the Bilco. The foundation is 5” high. After the grading, the foundation will only be 2” high. The asphalt patching is temporary, the customer is going to rip out the driveway and redo it. ALWAYS change your cellar door before the driveway, if it is adjacent. This way we can do any and all foundation repairs without impacting a freshly paved driveway.

This customer had a foot of water in her basement in very early May. She called us on May 5th, urgently hoping to change the Bilco before the next heavy rain. We completed the installation on May 19th. I told her that her flooding situation has been worsened by a new vinyl fence, but the new Bilco is now high enough to prevent a repeat. 

For more information, and to review all of our blog postings, see www.confidenthomeremodelers.com We install cellar doors throughout Northern New Jersey. We’ll soon be expanding our install coverage to include the Lehigh Valley and Bucks County, PA. We’re told the area is tremendously underserved by Cellar Door professionals.