Finishing 1000sqft Basement

Posted Mar 3, 2024

By Joe Bartelmo

5 min read

I may do a mini-series of posts on this at some point, this was a long lived project, and will always have little touch-ups worth of work. If I do I’ll update the table below with links to the pages.

This project was one I’ve wanted done for a long time, effectively doubling the square footage of this house, now up to 2800ish from 1500 when we bought the house. This was a very long and complicated project with a great many ups and downs, but all in all took about 1 full year to finish end to end with everything in between.

This project required me to prepare everything for the future while working on it - I wanted to drywall the ceiling and have minimal access panels, this all therefore took a lot of work to get the basement into “finishing shape”.

Basement Design

The worst part of the design was positioning of everything we wanted. Comprimises had to be made several times due to the size of the basement. The unfinished basement had only the bathroom (already finished), and the closet at the bottom of the plan.

The original garage was 30ft in size, so we will be capturing some of it back with a small office.

We wanted to keep the laundry shoot, so the laundry room had to stay put where it was.

The TV is hung directly in front of the window is the only flaw in the design. The TV could not be mounted facing the garage wall because of the support beam’s awkward placement in the imddle of the basement - right in front of where the seating would go. I had an option to seal the window, but I thought the extra light would be nice when not in use. I think this was probably a mistake tbh, but only time will tell.

The List

Status	Category	TODO Item	Time taken	Difficulty	Notes
✔️	🧰 General	Clean out the basement	1 weeks	Easy	SO much crap had to be removed, a dumpster was rented for this. Another dumpster was later rented after drywall was completed.
✔️	🧰 General	Remediate water problems	2 weeks	Medium	Lots of painful manual labor, no help
✔️	📐 Carpentry	Basement Windows	1 week	Easy	Replaces single pane windows with double pane windows
✔️	📔 Design	Design basement	2-3 months	Hard	Concurrently happened while working on other things
✔️	🧰 General	Insulation	1 month	Easy	Foam board insulation, R14
✔️	🔨 Framing	Subfloor	2 weeks	Easy	Drytek, R5, had help from a few friends
✔️	🔨 Framing	Office Framing	2 weeks	Medium	30 foot garage turns into 20ft garage, small office added
✔️	💣 Demolition	Office door	3 days	Hard	Remove CMU between office Framing and basement
✔️	💣 Demolition	Remove Boiler and Concrete pad	3 days	Hard	Where old pad is locating becomes a bedroom, so must flatten the area.
✔️	🔨 Framing	Insulate office and install subfloor	1 day	Easy	R20 Insulation in floor joists, R14 rockwall and foamboard, for R28 surrounding office
✔️	⚡ Electrical	Rewire inlaw suite	1 month	Hard	Inlaw suite wired improperly, i had to run a new line over to the in law suite underground along with Plumbing
✔️	⚡ Electrical	Remove all junction boxes	3 weeks	Medium	Lots of wire tracing
✔️	🔧 Plumbing	Reroute all water lines	2 weeks	Medium	Pex manifold, condensing into one spot for bulkhead
✔️	⚡ Electrical	Add Subpanels	3 days	Easy	Rerouted a bunch of lines into 3 subpanels, this allows us to future expand for other remodels
✔️	🔨 Framing	Frame the basement	3 weeks	Medium	Large open room, 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 1 laundry room, 2 utility rooms, 1 closet
✔️	⚡ Electrical (low voltage)	Run lines for all speakers	Easy	2 weeks	5.1.4 dolby atmos
✔️	⚡ Electrical	Install lights and switches	1 week	-
✔️	🧰 General	Reroute Radon Fan	1 week	Part of demolition was to remove concrete floor around this small closet space. I instaled a french drain, sump pump, and radon fan.
✔️	🔧 Plumbing	Rough in laundry room, and bar/kitchen area	1-2 days	Easy
✔️	🔧 Plumbing	Redo primary Septic stack	1-2 days	Easy	For piping consolidation into bulkhead
✔️	🧰 General	Insulate ceiling	3 days	Easy	Safe and sound to help prevent sound from traveling upstairs or downstairs. Applied to half the basement (home theater and under bedrooms)
✔️	🔨 Framing	Install Resilent Channel	1 days	Easy	From all the sound proofing advice i’ve found, a decoupling layer is the best, so this was done across the whole basement ceiling.
✔️	🎨 Drywall	Hang drywall	1-2 weeks	Medium	Had 2 batches of help do this. 93 sheets of drywall takes a toll on the body. Roughly 2 tonnes
✔️	🎨 Drywall	Spackle	4 weeks	Hard	No one wants to help with this lmao. It took forever, after work a few hours. Taping layer by far took the longest.
✔️	🧰 General	Paint	4 weeks	Easy	No one wants to help with this lmao. It took forever, after work a few hours. Taping layer by far took the longest.
✔️	📐 Carpentry	Trim	2 weeks	Easy	At the point where i was feeling done with the basement, so started taking it slow. Took forever to do the trim and caulk
✔️	📐 Carpentry	Install Cabinets	1 week	Medium	Basement is on a slope, so i had to level the cabinets. Butchers block ontop was stained and polyerathaned
✔️	⚡ Electrical	Install HVAC	1 week	I got a pioneer minisplit that had a pre-charged compressor. All that was required was line evacuation. Hydronic heaters in office and bedroom.
👷	🧰 General	Touchups	Ongoing	Easy	Painting touch ups now that its lived in, painting some trim, gotta paint doors too
-	🧰 General	Finish storage area	Did not start	Easy	Just want to hang some shelves and clean the floor in there so it isn’t just a “junk” closet