Adding a new finished basement to a home can be a great way to add additional space to your home. As many homeowners today find themselves stuck in their current home, because of declining real estate prices or less secure employment situations, adding new space to your existing home can be a great way to get more out of what you already have. I stop short of saying that it is a great investment, as we’ve seen the past few years that any investment in real estate can be risky. But for many people, it can be considered a great investment in improving their own lives. And when it does come time to sell your home, a home with a wonderfully finished basement is always going to stand out in the competitive nature of home selling.  Once you know what you want to build, what your budget is, your timeline, and of course, have reached out for some free basement estimates from our contractors, you are ready to begin planning your project.

Once we decided to have a basement finished for this project, the first thing we did was to determine the need and how finishing the basement would solve that issue. The home we used for this project had a very nice and large basement, with a 13 course cinder block foundation to allow for high ceilings. It already had plumbing rough ins from the original home builder, which we would take into consideration for planning purposes. The only downside was that the furnace and hot water tank were position right in the middle of the area, essentially dividing the space into nearly equal areas.  I sketched the outline of all of the walls on a piece of paper, and took my 25 foot tape measure down to the space to get very accurate (*important) measurements of each wall.  It is ok for the sketches to not be drawn to scale as long as you’ve written down the exact measurements of each wall.

Once I had this information, it left us with multiple ways to design the space we wanted to create.  This was the fun part.   I used a really great free online tool called Google Sketchup (download it here) and after taking a few tutorials, I was able to use the tool well enough to create a visual of the space I had available to me.  This space was ultimately going to be used for office space ( I work from home, and often have computer programmers working with me, so I needed a true ‘home office’of more than just one office).   But for the purposes of this project, we wanted to design something that would really fit with what most homeowners would like to do.  Fortunately, with the amount of space we had available, we had plenty that we could do.

One thing to keep in mind when designing a basement is to allocate enough storage space.  As this is probably a catchall for you now, you will likely want to make sure that you can still keep all of the things that you have in the basement now, even after the basement is finished.  This may seem impossible if your basement is anything like mine, but a well planned storage area or two, with shelving, can really store a lot of things in smaller spaces.   We decided on two separate storage spaces in this basement.  One in the area where the furnace and hot water tank are located, where we can store safe things like outdoor lawn furniture in the winter, and another separate storage room for things like the lawn mower and snowblower during their offseason.   We were also largely set with the bathroom area because of the pre-determined area for the plumbing rouch-ins.  We could move these by tearing up the concrete floor of the basement and re-laying the pipes, but I didn’t see how that would ever be a good idea.

I grabbed some masking tape and started to lay out my rough idea of what rooms would go where.   We knew that we would have a full bathroom in the space, with a decent sized shower.  We also knew that we would want a nice sized bar area for entertaining (clients, in my case).  There would be a workout room where we could keep our treadmill and weight bench, and another room which would be a media room (home theater for some people, green screen video studio to do video recording for me).  The layout of this on the floor meant that to have a nice transition from one room to the next, I would also need a nice, somewhat open landing at the bottom of the basement steps.  This is key to keep mind, especially if it may be tricky to move furniture to the basement in the future.

I then started the tedious process of wasterproofing the walls in the basement.  I did that work myself instead of contracting it out.  But if you should do this yourself, know that you will have a very sore back for a long time afterward.  I used Dry-Lock basement waterproofing paint, which is a very heavy and thick substance to apply to cinder block walls.  It takes a lot longer than you would expect, as it get sucked into the walls very easily.  Two coats are absolutely necessary, three would be ideal.   But do it, definitely do it.  It’s the one thing you can’t do later, so take your time, spend the money, and put it on your walls.  There is nothing good about water damage to a finished basement.

We’ll be continuing this dialogue on what we experienced, but that wraps up the first article on planning a basement project.   And of course, once you are finished with this step, always request free basement estimates from Basement Estimates.com!   I hope this article provided some value to you!