Back in 2003, I had my basement finished using the Owens Corning Basement System. It's an alternative to dry-wall that looks similar to dry-wall but is actually soft to the touch (that is, it is almost like a cushion).
The advantages of Owens Corning's system to normal dry-wall (According to Owens Corning) include:
- Basements can be finished much quicker. The 1200 square foot or so of our basement that we got finished was done in about 10 days (compared to months with dry-wall).
- It is very damage resistant -- it doesn't scratch, it looks the same 2 years after the fact.
- It is allegedly black mold resistant. Drywall, being made of wood, can serve as a place for mold to grow. Owens Corning's system is synthetic, nothing grows.
- It's water damage resistant -- you can get it wet and it looks fine once it dries.
- It acts as a great sound proofing mechanism. The basement is quiet.
- It has good acoustics. Great for home theaters and such.
It also has down sides:
- It's quite expensive. Significantly more-so than Dry Wall.
- The sales people who sell it use an obnoxious hard sell technique that is, IMO, borderline unethical.
- It is hard to modify. That is, you want put shelves or "nail" things to the wall, you really can't, you have to do it with special fasteners since the wall isn't made of wood, it doesn't support other structures being placed on it well.
- You're tied into Owens Corning for repairs, modifications, etc.
- Bears repeating - the sales people who sell it use rather unsavory sales tactics in which if you don't actually bargain them down you could pay 2X as much as you really should.
My original review can be found here. Since it was the first review on a major site, it has over 150 different websites pointing to it. 20,000 people alone have visited because it shows up high in Google's search engine. But it also means that there's hundreds of comments which can be hard to go through.
So I've established this running article as a way for people to post their experiences with Owens Corning Basement System.
My overall experience has been positive. But since I run a company and deal with aggressive sales people all the time, I didn't have a problem neutralizing their sales techniques. But they are unusually aggressive (note that these sales people rarely work for Owens Corning directly, they work for other companies who sell it). And our experience was mildly soured by attempts to nickel and dime us at the end.
But overall, 2 years later, I'm pretty happy with it and am glad we went with it. I do sometimes get jealous of my neighbors who did a true "full finish" basement that looks like their upstairs. But then I remind myself that it took them 6 months to do that whereas mine was done in 10 days without any mess or fuss. It's not for everyone but for us, it worked out pretty well.
Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments area and I will try to post some of them here from time to time.