Building a Finished Basement

In many areas of the country, you'll find a basement under just about every house. Local building codes normally required that there be an open air space below a home, at least as deep as the freezing level of the soil. A concrete foundation with a crawl space works in some locales, but more common is to excavate, pour foundation walls, and build a complete basement area below the house. Unlike the rest of your home, where walls are made of wood and surrounded by air on the outside, your basement has concrete walls that are surrounded by soil and moisture outside. Since concrete is porous, water and moisture can seep through the foundation walls and lead to a damp, humid, musty basement. Depending on where you live, you can have a very dry basement, or a very wet basement that even requires a sump pump to keep water out. All these things need to be taken into consideration when you think about building a finished basement.

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The basement area of the home is normally left in an "unfinished" state after construction -- that is, base concrete walls, exposed plumbing and duct work, exposed electrical wiring, etc. What is a finished basement? A finished basement simply means completing the construction work to make the area look like a normal, finished room you'd find upstairs. That is, wall board, lighting, ceiling, hidden duct, plumbing, and electrical components, etc. It is much easier to plan for a finished basement if you are doing new construction. For example, you will want to pour your foundation a little deeper so you have more ceiling space in the basement, allowing you to hide beams and duct work without crowding out your normal ceiling height. A standard basement has a gridwork of lally columns supporting beams, which combined support the weight of the house above. Newer, stronger steel framework can allow beams to span larger distances without requiring lally columns, which means you need fewer columns in the middle of the space.

Finished Basement Plans

Assuming you have a basement already and it is dry enough to consider finishing out, your first step will be to look at the space and think about what kind of rooms and activities you want to have there. Will you be building a game room? A fitness and weight lifting room? A home theater? Are you looking for one big room or several smaller rooms? What about some storage and closet areas? How about access to plumbing, heating, and mechanical components? As you draw this out on paper, you also need to figure out how you will work around existing beams, columns, and ductwork, which can be a real challenge. Check out FinishedBasement.ca for some great finished basement photo to get your creative juices flowing!

Obviously, you don't want a metal lally columns standing in the middle of your kids playroom, so you either build interior walls that follow the lines of the columns and hide them inside, or find ways to disguise them by building a fireplace, column, or some other design element that incorporates them. The same is true with low-hanging duct work - you need to either build walls nearby or soffits to cover them up. As you plan, you also need to think about basement lighting. Recessed lighting works best in a basement, since nothing protrudes below the level of the ceiling where headroom is already limited. You can also use accent lighting to draw attention where you want it and away from where you don't want it. Good, bright lighting can really make the difference in making a finished basement feel like the rest of the house and not a damp, underground storage area. Even better is if you have a daylight basement with at least one side open to the outdoors, with windows or sliding doors. A little natural light goes a long way for an underground living space. You'll also need to decide if you want to use special basement construction materials, with metal framing and panelled walls and a hung ceiling, or will you use standard wooden framing and wallboard. The materials you choose will determine the feel of the space - will it seem more like a basement or more like the rest of the house? Check out OwensCorning.com/around/bfs for some good ideas for what finished basement roooms can look like. They sell the Owens Corning Basement Finishing System with special wall panels that are insulated, moisture resistant, and dent resistant, making them a good choice for many basement finishing plans. The panels are also removable if you need to get access to plumbing or wiring.

Basement Construction

When we had our basement finished, we opted for standard framing and wallboard techniques. First, a plastic vapor barrier was installed along the concrete foundation walls to keep moisture away from our new framing. Then, just like in a normal house, two by fours were used to frame in the walls and build soffits around ductwork. We built several rooms following the lines of the lally columns, leaving us with just one column near the stairs that couldn't be hidden in a wall. The solution? We created a nice, wooden fluted column around it that matched the newel post on the stairs. The framing was insulated, and then wallboard was put up. We walled off 3 separate areas that were left unfinished - one around the furnace and oil tank, one around the HVAC system, and one in the back for general storage. We also did a normal wallboard ceiling. Some people like doing a hung ceiling, like you see in most office building and in all the movies where people remove a tile from the ceiling and go crawling around in there. While a hung ceiling does give you easy access to plumbing and duct work, it also makes your rooms feel "un-homey" and not as warm and inviting as a normal ceiling. Since we had a very dry basement, we opted for carpeting with a good thick pad to insulate against the concrete floor below. Again, some people opt for tile or linoleum - depends on your tastes and dampness of your space. We had about 2/3 recessed lighting, and 1/3 very thin profile ceiling mount lights, which provided better direct light for the area that held the ping pong table. How much does it cost to finish a basement? We spent about $18K for around 1200sf of finished space, which covered the framing, electrical, painting, etc. Carpet was extra. In general, you can expect to spend about half of what it would cost to build an addition to your home, so the space you gain in the basement is definitely the cheapest way to add on to your house. In general, the cost will depend on the size of the space and the amenities involved, but figure a minimum of $10-13K even for a small basement, and be prepared to pay $25K-35K if you are putting in a lot of extras and special touches.

Finishing your basement

Other things to consider.. Do you want to install a dehumidifier? Basements can get musty and damp, and if you have invested in walls, floors, and furniture for your basement, you will probably want to keep that moisture out. Look into a dehumidifier. Dehumidifiers basically suck moisture out of the area, leaving you with a container of water. You can get manually dumping ones that require you to empty them out, but you'll be better off if you get one with a pump system that drains the water outside for you. You'll also want to make sure you have the proper points of egress, per your local building code, for safety purposes.

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