Basement buildout help/suggestion

[davelin315]

Evan, my biggest concern for what you're doing is that your tank is in your utility room with a water heater. From your drawing, the water heater looks to be gas with the central line going up and out of that room. If you vent out, which is almost a must in an enclosed room with a tank, the air being drawn out that way could conceivably interfere with the vent which runs off of a draft theory with heat running up the vent pipe and rising out of the house from what I understand. If you have air being sucked out another way via a fan it might cause the exhaust (CO - Carbon Monoxide!) to not go up the vent and out of your house.

 

In regards to the floor - it's very difficult to balance a stand on a floor that is not even... most of us build stands on as flat a surface as possible so they're square. When I built mine, I discovered how not flat my floor was and then had a bent top to boot. Lots of shims later I had a flat stand, but it would have been smarter to lay a new floor or, in the alternative, put down sand inside an enclosed frame and put the stand on top of that to allow it to be equally supported all the way around. I've thought about doing this in the future to level a tank stand as well by building a small lip all the way around the tank and then filling it with sand and placing the tank on top and tapping until the sand was level throughout.