Tips to Finish Your Basement

Tap to Read ➤ Rita Putatunda

Utilizing a basement can be a great way to increase living space. Let us look at some tips and techniques by which you can make your basement a useful area.

Finishing your basement can enable you to turn this usually dank, dark, unused place in the house into an inviting place to retire in, which can be soothingly cooling in the summer and snugly cozy in winters.

With a little effort and a fair amount of planning, you can turn it into a recreation room for the family, an area where you can entertain your friends, a den, a play area for children, or a place to set up your home theater in.

Flooring

The main problem of the basement flooring is the moisture. Moisture seepage can result in carpets getting moldy, the warping of laminated, hardwood flooring, or lead to the adhesive that you may have used for other flooring material to become weak.

One of the best ways of preventing this is to install a moisture barrier in order to prevent seepage. Plus, if the floor is damaged in any way or is cracked, these have to be rectified before installing new flooring.

Choose flooring material according to the conditions and requirements, and of course your own sense of style. You could opt for various types of flooring material like carpeting, laminated material, cement, porcelain, ceramic, or hardwood.

In case you go for a carpet on the floor, it is a good idea to get a thick padding material or even double padding it. This will add comfort to your basement, even out little irregularities on the floor.

Ceiling

Another problem area in basements is the height of the ceiling. Most ceilings of basements are lower compared to the other rooms.

There are several ideas that can be incorporated to counter this, such as finishing around the duct-work, creating a box-like effect, re-ducting the basement, excavating the floor in order to lower it. Additionally up-lighting, using lighter-colored ceiling, and installing mirrors on the ceiling can also be helpful.

Lighting

As basements have a tendency of being gloomy and dark, adding ample lighting is good idea to brighten up the space.

In case a portion of your basement is above ground level, make the best use of this, by installing a number of windows or enlarging the existing ones.

You can install indirect lighting, creating splashes of light pools on the ceiling. Apart from making the room look more spacious, this has the additional effect of making the ceiling appear higher.

You can mix this up with recessed lighting, table lamps, floor lamps, spot lights and directional lights mounted on the walls, track lights, and so on to create interesting moods.

There are many ideas that you can think of if you want to re-do your basement. It is a great idea to ask your entire family to help you in the process so that you save money on labor charges.