Hello family and friends! I hope you enjoy the house tours we shared with you so far. We spent 95% of our time in the ranch on the main floor and in the backyard. Sometimes we forget that we still have entire half of of house beneath our feet! Yes. The hidden half of our house – a full basement!
As I told you yesterday, the ranch is about 1700 sqft (not counting the garage), and it is divided into 850sqft on the main floor and 850 sqft in the basement. The basement floor plan look like this:
Which is really similar to the main floor plan:
The biggest difference is that the main floor has a kitchen, and the basement has a third bedroom and utility room. The front bedroom is also slightly smaller than the main floor office.
In this first video, we will walk down the stairs, and take a look at the basement living room, and two of the bedrooms:
As you can see, most of the basement floor is covered by carpet, and there is no hardwood floor underneath. We poked around a little and think that under the carpet, there is concrete floor in one bedroom, and old linoleum flooring in another bedroom and in the living room. It will take us some time to clean everything off the floor, and we need to decide what type of flooring we want to use here.
The wood paneling wall is also up for debate. It is in a pretty decent shape, and it is costly to dry wall. but Slav haaaates it. So at least we will paint it a lighter color?
This second video showed you the utility room and the third bedroom I talked about.
The plan is to take down the drywall here and join the third bedroom to the utility room. So at least we can walk around our washer and dryer with their doors open! The studs in this drywall are not even supporting to the roof joints, so it will be pretty easy to just cut every off and open it up.
After we open it up, the basement will change from this:
to something like this:
So how are we gonna use this 850 sqft space? Tentatively, we would like to convert the basement into a guest suite. Something like this:
That includes:
1. We would like to add a private entrance to the basement from the outside, and close the stairs inside.
2. We will keep both bedrooms downstairs, so we can host more family/friends at the same time. The private entrance will take away some of the space from one bedroom, but it is a pretty good size now and it will still fit a single bed/bunk bed without problem.
3. We will make the living room a movie theater/entertainment center by mounting the projector/screen down here.
4. The large room we gained from the third bedroom will be converted into a simple kitchen.
5. We will make a closet to conceal the furnace, water heater, and potential the washer and dryer.
6. We will put egress window in both bedrooms and living room. It is more than what the code asks for, but we care about fire safety and bigger window also let in more light.
What do you think? Any suggestions? Have you remodeled basement in your house, Or installed egress windows yourself?
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