Basement: Planning

Best Laid Plans

After living in our 20-year old home for about 4 years, we decided it was time to finish the basement. Fortunately, we were lucky in that the builder had done a good job constructing the basement to keep out the #1 enemy: WATER. Around the perimeter of the foundation was a standard perforated pipe which drained into a standard sump. But the key element was proper grading - our house had well graded soil around the foundation and I kept up with the gutter cleaning and downspout maintenance so that a lot of the rainwater was kept away from the foundation to begin with. Even in heavy continuous rains the basement never had any seepage. Furthermore, I had bought a 40-pint dehumidifier and connected it permanently to the sump (no condensate bucket to empty), so the relative humidity easily stayed at 50% or less year round. So that was good - we had a dry room to work with.

I was also fortunate to have enough headroom to make the space liveable. From the concrete floor to the bottom of the floor joists I had 7'7", with the lowest clearance being 6'9" from the main beams to the floor - more than enough clearance to meet code. The builder and all of the subs were very good about keeping the headroom as high as possible by routing the utilities (especially the drains and ductwork) inside the joist cavities or closely parallel to the main beams. So that was another plus - plenty of ceiling height.

So with a dry, tall space - what would we do with it? Years ago basement remodels usually were to make a "rumpus" room or a play room for the kids. Well, this is the 2000's, man, and what every decent house needs is this: A HOME THEATER!

I have been using AutoCAD for many years at my job, so using it to lay out a scale plan for the basement was easy. What wasn't easy was deciding exactly how to use the space. I went through four basically different floor plans before settling on the one shown here. What drove this final decision was to utilize the usable space as much as possible. My home has two I-beams running the width across the first floor. The first one (nearest the bottom of the plan) I would enclose in a soffit along with the 4-inch PVC main waste pipe running along side of it. The second I-beam would be where I would run a partition wall to divide the new space from the existing workshop and furnace area, although I would frame out an alcove for the wide-screen TV. The space where the main sewer clean-out would be boxed in to make another utility room, perfect for storage.

In my iterations of plans, I waffled back and forth over whether to include a half bathroom. It would really be a nice convenience, but ultimately the cost was too much to justify. I did not have roughed in plumbing for a bathroom and becaues I have overhead sewers, a new bath would have required busting up the slab and installing an ejector pump - waaaay too much money. So rather than go that route, I decided to use the space for a snack bar area, complete with cabinets and two-level countertop bar.

Most cities will require you to have an egress window in the basement if you are going to use it as living space. In fact, if you are going to have one or more bedrooms, then most cities require an egress window in each bedroom. This is another significant cost driver, as installing one requires excavation and cutting into the foundation - not easy or cheap. Again, I got lucky in that our builder had installed an egress window in what would be the workshop area of the remodel, which was sufficient to meet code.

I STRONGLY recommend that once you have laid out a plan for your basement, that you mock it up to scale on the floor using blue painter's tape. Then you can verify if the spacing for the walls, traffic flow, etc. will work, and you can catch any obvious bugs in your design before changes make it costly.

The final version of our plan (shown above) yields around 500 square feet of additional living space. The area for the home theater was large enough to accommodate a 4-person theater couch, the snack bar area was just large enough for an "L-shaped" run of cabinets, and the space behind the couch would fit a foosball table and a dartboard.

Permit or no Permit?

At this point, I had complete plans and was ready to start construction. The next question at this stage is a common one - should I get a building permit or blow it off? In my village, remodeling a basement specifically requires a building permit; however, that hasn't stopped many of my neighbors from doing theirs without one. I, however, looked at it this way: I'm adding significant value to my largest investment, and want it done right, both for now and for the future. When it comes time to sell, any home buyer with half a brain would ask whether the construction was covered by a building permit (wouldn't YOU??) And regarding the cost associated with a permit, it's trivial - only a couple of hundred dollars on a project with a budget of $20,000. My advice is this - for a basement remodel if you SHOULD have a permit, then GET a permit.

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