20/20 Blog

Have you wondered about remodeling your basement? Could you use the extra living space? Would it improve the value of your home and would you get the bang you require for your buck? What are the things one needs to consider when remodeling a basement?

As a designer and a contractor, you think it would be a no-brainer for me to remodel my own basement; power for the course. What really happens with most people indulging personally in their own professions is that old adage “the cobbler’s family has no shoes.” When I started my business out of my house, my mother was famous for coming in and saying, “I hope you don’t have client meetings at your house.” While I am making my clients’ design fantasies come true, my house is pretty much as it was when we moved in 8 years ago and added on to with 3 kids, 2 dogs, various rodents at various times, an outdoor cat, and 3 chickens. Oh, and did I mention I love gardening? Iwould much rather dig in the dirt than housework. And my husband and I are very good at avoiding house work if we can play instead. So you can understand my mother’s sentiment however rude and unsupportive. Could we commit and stay invested in a remodel to the end? I know if it wasnt for my husband, I would be happy still living out of cardboard boxes and consider piles of things as “organized”.

This brings me back to the question of whether remodeling my basement was a no-brainer for me. It wasn’t. I had to review with my husband – were we ready to commit mentally and physically? We had to review why we wanted to remodel our basement. The economy we had when we started(2008/2009) was a big factor. I was downsizing my design office and moving it home. (The design & construction industry was screeching to a whiplash halt and the overhead would’ve killed my business.) I needed a home office. Our children were outgrowing their 10′x10′ playroom which also doubled as my husband’s home office. We needed an additional bathroom and I secretly fantasized about a laundry room where we didnt have to pick our laundry up off of a concrete floor under the light of a bare bulb nor have to walk around our main sewer waste pipe to put the washing into the dryer. We had to review our finances. We came to the realization that if we didn’t do the remodel, we couldn’t function as a sane family and I couldn’t run my business professionally. And, in our neighborhood, a basement remodel would significantly increase the value of our home instantly. It was a sound investment. This, in a way, made our decision a “no-brainer”. “We” became one of my clients.

I had to design within a budget event though it was my own house because we couldn’t afford the real showplace all people think designers should be living in. So, I had to come up with a “showplace” design on a budget. That was usually power for the course with every project I worked on. To keep costs down, we did a lot of the labor ourselves. As a contractor, I was used to that, but my husband was not. He is a “nervous nelly”. Nervous about tackling big jobs he knows nothing about and nervous about me because he knows how I like to jump feet first into any project and figure out what to do next… next. My husband is a perfectionist and I am a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-til-its-done-ist. To date, we have worked together well with only a few arguments that we took to our therapist. I have come to appreciate my husband’s perfectionism and he has come to respect my ability to create something out of nothing, make it work, and make it look great! He trusts me more now and I have developed more patience for his insistence on thinking things through til he feels comfortable progessing on with the project. My husband only has Plan A, where I am always armed with Plans B, C, D, E, etc when I start a task. Plan A usually costs less money altho Plan B should be considered as well at the start of any new task. You see things you didnt see before in the design/planning stage. I do believe in the evaluation of each task before starting ; cross t’s and dot i’s. I have a good example of this further in the remodel blog.

In evaluating the feasibility of our basement remodel, we had to consider the following as anyone should when thinking about their basement viability:

Ceiling Height -high enough for code and livability?
Light – natural and artificial – what can you handle?
Safety Egress – if you are having a family room or bedroom in the basement- code.
Flooding and dampness – possibility of sewage back-up or dampness that could cause mildew,
mold and other bio-hazards.
Potential for a bathroom and/or laundry
Consideration of an apartment use or duplex use – check all building codes and confer with a
contractor or architect.
Accessibility from main living areas of the house
How will you heat and vent the space?
Existing electrical and plumbing conditions – acceptable or total re-do?

After our initial due diligence, which turned out all favorable, we proceeded with the design for our basement. Our basement was semi-finished with an old 50′s rec room and some T&G; paneled storage rooms. We designed for my office to be in the old rec room space (with existing fireplace), a storage room under the stairs (always a good place for storage, bathrooms, or wet bars), a family room for the kids with adjacent bathroom, laundry room where existing laundry was, but with a better configuration, and a giant storage/utility room for all of my STUFF. Heaven! A girl loves her simple pleasures.

Finishes would be simple, affordable, but dynamic and a showplace for future clients. I am a designer after all. We also had to consider keeping the basement light filled and well-lit. I grew up playing in a dungeon basement and totally did not want my basement and my office to feel that oppressive. We would do as much of the work as possible and re-use materials as we could. We would also shop sales, the rebuilding centers, and wheel and deal with my suppliers. We would also try to keep our marriage together through this remodel – a true test of the stability of any relationship.

The following progress pictures and reports show how we did all that we set out to do. At the end, I will reveal how much everything cost and how long it took us to complete. Please read additional blogs posted for more information.