4 Things to do Before you Finish your Basement

if you've decided to finish your basement or you're thinking of finishing your basement before you go framing any walls or picking any paints there's four things you can do that don't cost you any money but will save you money before you get started i'm belganie and i'm going to coach you up on how to finish your basement the number one thing on our list for you to do before you start finishing your basement is figuring out why you're going to do it the overwhelming majority of the people that we work with that finish their basement i'm a renovation contractor have been for about a decade they will finish their basement to add room to their house they have young families little kids usually is to finish a rec room or add a bedroom downstairs for when in-laws come to visit something to that effect maybe they need an office downstairs but really get to the why of the reasoning behind you finishing your basement i mean maybe you're trying to put a basement apartment in for income and that's that's a smaller proportion because that's a bigger cost but again same reasoning why are you doing it this is a principle that's going to guide you along the decision-making process of finishing your basement so when you have tough decisions to make whether it's about your budget or finishes or any of that your flooring how durable you want it why you're doing it is going to help you make those choices and make them a little bit easier along the way we're going to bleed into our second point which is your needs and your wants so what do you need you have teenagers you need another bathroom your in-laws come to visit a lot to help with the kids you need another bedroom you need a rec room for the kids to play or you need to move the laundry from upstairs to downstairs just for a better life these are the things you're going to figure out because that's going to dictate what rooms you can have or not necessarily dictate but your space if you have a 500 square foot basement that's going to dictate what rooms you can have if you only have 500 square feet or 400 square feet or you're in a town house and you have 350 square feet you're not going to have a bedroom and a bathroom and an office in a rec room you're going to have a combination of multi-use spaces in this area so you're going to want to invest time into figuring out what your needs are you want to be honest with yourself don't be too extravagant you're going to put in a bathroom do you want heated floor do you need heated floor one of the things we talk about with bathrooms and basements is you don't want it to be nicer than the bathroom you use every day if it's only going to get used by guests or used sparingly or you know your kids are essentially going to use it to go to the bathroom when they're downstairs watching a movie or playing video games so it can be functional but it doesn't have to be crazy so we figured out your why we figured out your needs and your wants number three is going to be addressing your budget figure out how much money you're going to have available to do this are you going to use savings are you going to borrow money against your house are you going to finance it by other means figure this out before you go collecting quotes and getting costs because you need to know how you're going to do it maybe you can't mobilize enough money to get it all done at once maybe you do in phases what i kind of tell clients when they ask me hey how much is a basement renovation i tell them you're buying a car you're buying a new car it's a new toyota camry you're driving it off a lot see you later that's what it is because i'd rather tell them right away hey this is the cost are you okay with that then do the quote spend all the time putting together the material cost and the labor costs and all that and hand it to them and have them be shell shocked i find it more respectful to have that conversation early so then they can make a decision once you've figured out your budget you can make a plan you can say okay we have this amount of money we can do this part of our basement this year next year we'll save up a little bit more and then we'll do this part if you're going to be living in a house for a long time you don't have to do your basement all at once because right now you're probably not using it other than to store all your junk like everybody else every quote i go to in an unfinished basement people go please i want to apologize for the mess and i'm like this is like every other human out there their basement is just storage for everything so understanding that it's space you're not using you don't have to be in a rush to finish it you can do it over time we in another video will break down the tasks involved in finishing your basement and the steps from a construction point like what happens when which will allow you to plan that i mean think i think back to my parents they did renovations over years they saved their money they did what they could they hired trades when they could granted it wasn't the sexiest basement in the world but we had one and i was happy with that so we've gone through our three first points right our first three points sorry english is my first language figured out your why i've gone through your needs and you want you've figured out how much money you have and how much you can put together for all this the next one is a little more technical you're going to make a floor plan of your basement this is don't be intimidated by this this is something you can do you need a measuring tape a piece of paper pencil and just pick a corner remember rooms are just boxes and your basement is going to be boxes of different shapes imagine your stairs are a box and the walls are just the outside of the box and just go from there you know you want to maybe mark out where the windows are once you have a floor plan of what you have you can maybe photocopy that or use some softwares online to create a template and then you can tinker with that google sketchup is one floorplanner.com is another those are free there's a lot of different ones and we'll go over how to make a floor plan in another video because we're going to put out a lot of these to help you go from unfinished basement to finish space so making a floor plan is your next step the floor plan will help you calculate materials if you're going to do it yourself it will help you give it to suppliers your local big box store may have somebody who does estimates and they can tell you hey this is how much material you're going to need of what quantities and all that based on what you have that's if you if you have two floor plans you want your existing and you're proposed and then if you're going to hire a contractor or work with a contractor to do some yourself and have them do other parts the floor plan helps them feel like oh you're organizing together and you know what you're you want and they can help you with your plan if they're that type of contractor some contractors it's all or nothing other contractors they'll do parts like us you could also act as your own general contractor if you're not going to do the electrical and the plumbing and the hvac which i highly recommend you pay someone to do because you want the stuff in your walls warrantied the floor plan will allow you to get better quotes from them as well so that's going to wrap up the four things that you're going to need to do or you can do that don't cost you any money but will save you money when planning your basement i hope this helps we're going to be doing more doing more and more of these videos for planning your basement and helping you get it finished so hope to see on the next one

Channel: Basement Coach

Views: 28,409

Keywords: Basement renovation, Basement coach, Basement remodel, DIY, Simon Sinek, Bathroom, Floorplan, Renovation Budget

Id: 3pboF0hM3cc

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020