🏡 Better Homes 2022 Show your basement thread.

Pewter-Camaro

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May 28, 2011
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we had a garage thread so Let’s do a show your basement thread. I no longer have a townhouse and have an actual basement. My house was Built in the 40’s This basement started as a cellar or tornado shelter and Some time in the mid 50’s it was dug out and the house was expanded. Mid 70’s the house had a large addition and the basement was “finished” in the early 80’s. at some point in the 90’s it was partially gutted and had a workshop down here. It’s a shit show.

The weird wooden closet thing and most of the walls are coming down. Was supposed to do it this winter but Covid fucked me over.
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Some of the Drop ceiling has fallen down on its own, but eventually I’ll take it all down.
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Laundry room. It is plumbed for a bathroom already of to the right in this picture. This was added sometime in the 50’s.
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Plans are to add a room down here to use as a spare bedroom or office and have my man cave down here mostly for my music stuff and setup a small bench in the laundry room as an indoor work area.
 
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Shawn1112

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Little messy right now, Wifey still catching up on laundry and other shit from vacation, same with my son and his GF
Basement pretty much is my sons and his GF now a days. When the kids were younger it was more of a family room.
Basement was 100% wood paneling and wall paper when we bought the house 20yrs ago, also the family room and bar area all had old tile drop ceilings.
Ripped all that shit out, hug drywall in every room, only kept drop ceiling in bathroom and 2 bed rooms as we need those for plumbing access and other access.

Daughters room which is an empty room now that she moved out
Sons room
Family room
Bar
bathroom/laundry room/mechanical closet.

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OffshoreDrilling

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A mess of packing away holiday decor and assembling furniture, shop is a mess because it’s a shop. Living room/bar area is around 600sqft, storage/workshop is another 600sqft. We have a little bit of a crawl space too. Stairs up to the garage from the workshop.

Not going to touch anything down here as far as updating. It’s all in good condition, other areas of the house need more attention.
 

Shawn1112

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A mess of packing away holiday decor and assembling furniture, shop is a mess because it’s a shop. Living room/bar area is around 600sqft, storage/workshop is another 600sqft. We have a little bit of a crawl space too. Stairs up to the garage from the workshop.

Not going to touch anything down here as far as updating. It’s all in good condition, other areas of the house need more attention.
That bar has some potential, kind of what I wanted to do but it just wasnt in the cards financially at the time. I remember my Dad saying dont waste the space on a bar, you will use it a few times for the first few winters, then it becomes a place to hang or put shit down. Sure as shit, it was a hit the first 4-5 years, everyone would come over on the weekends and we would sit at my bar and or play poker on a poker table I had down there. In the last 10 years, I can count on one hand how many times we have partied down there lol.
 
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jason05gt

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Jan 17, 2007
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Mine is a work in progress. Still need to do paint, doors, trim, and that vinyl plank flooring. I may build a bar eventually too.

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I'm going to spray my basement ceiling. How hard was the prep? I have a lot of cobwebs and dust that I would want to take care of.

Also, it looks like you sprayed the can fixtures?
 

b00sted

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I'm going to spray my basement ceiling. How hard was the prep? I have a lot of cobwebs and dust that I would want to take care of.

Also, it looks like you sprayed the can fixtures?

Honestly, the best way is to just take an electric leaf blower to it. No matter what you do, there's still going to be some dust and dirt on top of the ducting/etc that will only come out of hiding when you're spraying... So just spray over it :)

Yeah, sprayed the fixtures and conduit. I just stuffed news paper up into each can to keep the paint off of the bulb outlet. I'm running LED panels anyways, so the inside of the can is 100% useless and not visible.

Mask every square inch of the basement and use a professional sprayer. I tried using one of those smaller consumer-grade Wagner sprayers first and it was a piece of shit. I finally paid my buddy (union painter) to grab a sprayer from work. It took him maybe 2 hours to mask everything with plastic and spray.. Including doing a few coats of paint. No matter how well you mask though, there's still going to be paint that gets on the floor/etc - so keep that in mind.
 

Lead Pipe

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I have a lot of basement envy looking at this thread. A basement bar is a huge priority for my next house. My old house had a decent finished basement that needed some work that I never got around to but I'm almost hoping my next place will have an unfinished basement so I can build it exactly how I like.
 
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