My house is over 100 years old, basement walls are field stone and concrete. It used to leak, but I've fixed that with gutters and grading. Now its just humid, cold water pipes sweat, card board gets soggy. In the winter months (Wisconsin) it seems to dry out. The basement is sealed up pretty tight, glass block windows, concrete floor though is old, chipping, and not very thick. Our heating system is hot water so theres no air circulation with the rest of the house. I'm thinking the boiler burning in winter does all the drying down there. We don't have air conditioning so the first and second floor windows are open all summer, and the humidity outside averages about 60%. Would sealing the walls and floor help any, or am I wasting my efforts?

Hi Folks, my wife and I just got a house and we're kind of lost on our first home-improvement project, so we'd appreciate any help :) The long backstory is this: So the basement is in two sections, one is the garage/furnace/etc, and part of it is finished and where we want our main living space to be. Now, the floor in the finished area is a mess. We believe the bottom layer is asbestos tiles (the house was built in the 60's), and my wife's mother (who gave us the house) had carpet over that. Unfortunately my sister-in-law, for some god forsaken reason, decided to rip up the carpet and then paint over the tile (but not fully ripping up the carpet so there's random fibers and glue patches making the floor uneven). To top it all off, since it's the basement it has moisture issues - there's no standing water or collected moisture or anything like that ever, but it's definately damp. We're planning on running a dehumidifier but we want an option that doesn't *require* us to be running a dehumidifier to be able to maintain it. So the short version is that we have a mildly damp basement with a concrete floor, covered with asbestos tile, covered in paint and/or carpet fibers. Because we've just got the house and moving and being married and whatnot we're on a fairly strict budget and doing everything ourselves. So that essentially eliminates taking out the old tile correct? We can't really afford an environmental team to come out and do it. A worker/contractor at home depot said we could probably just pull the tiles out ourselves if we wear masks - but that doesn't seem like a great idea, or would that be fine? Which leads to what our plan was. We obviously need to level the floor to put something down. We were told that the self-leveling compound won't stick to the paint, so a contractor we met (very helpful guy in home depot, lol), suggested we put down exterior grade plywood attached to the paint/asbestos tile with liquid nails as a subfloor and then use the quick level on top of that. I'm assuming the exterior grade was because of the potential dampness that could occur, but do we have to worry about mold or anything since it is still wood? And do we have to worry about warping and/or the liquid nails being effected by moisture? As long as that plan is okay, we were just going to put down adhesive and ceramic tile over the self-leveling compound and be done with it. Are we going to run into any problems or does anybody have any tips or advice? We thought we had that plan down and it sounded fine - but looking in home depot tonight, ANOTHER worker guy said that we would end up running into problems because of the moisture (when the other guy said it should be fine) and he was the one who suggested we just take up the asbestos tile ourselves. So at this point we're just confused and disheartened. Any directions, guidance, advice, anything would be greatly appreciated! Thanks everyone, Dave