BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – HOME MODEL DRAWING
Basement Remodeling Tutorial
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This is an exercise — like a physical workout.
However, this time the exercise is about designing. Designing basements. Home design ideas. Here are a half-dozen or so nuggets of purely refined wisdom and understanding from that great geezer, the Autocad Granddad.
You may see basement build out remodeling work of the AG's in several other parts of this website —
Cross-Section Home Drawing, Carpentry Plans, Coffer Ceiling
Detail Home Drawing, Carpentry Plans, Ceiling Coffer
Home plans & Elevations, Basement Remodeling
Schematics, Home Electrical Wiring Diagram
And . . .
Model Home Drawing, Basement Remodeling.
The AG's seen a lot of lousy design jobs in basements, been asked a lot of questions about building out basements, designed and built out a fair number in his time. Now's he's giving back. To start things rolling, it's all words, no home drawing until much later on. Nuts and bolts. If you don't like reading, thinking, imagining, then drop out now and go back to your comic book. Or you can skip the instructive stuff and scroll down to the pretty pictures now.
These are the questions we'll address.
What's the role of a basement build out in the home plan design program scheme of things?
What does that role mean to a home designer? (This topic takes the longest to handle. The others run out more quickly.)
Hard ceiling or soft?
What to do with walls?
What to do with floors?
How about lighting?
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Design Role of A Basement?
The AG thinks that a home basement is just another potential room or set of rooms (depending on the size of the basement) in a home. The basement should look like it belongs to the home it's beneath. It or parts of it may rightly serve functionally in different ways from other rooms in the home, but that's the end to differences with the home. Said another way, the two biggest mistakes the AG has seen with stunning frequency when it comes to botched basement build outs are these — designed up and designed down.
When a basement is designed up, it looks better than the rest of the home. This may or may not be a matter of more money. Usually is. Doesn't have to be. Good design of any sort does not necessarily mean big money.
Here's a real-life example of dressing up which the AG witnessed, even participated, until he couldn't take it anymore. Take a fancy '80s home without a sliver of paneling in the upper floors (only chair rail now and then), not a square inch of dark stain, not one column or dolled-up arch (beyond some cased openings) anywhere, not one drop of high-gloss sealer. Then go to the basement build out and find several thousand linear feet of dark-stained panels and trimwork, highly accented columns and arches, all shining brightly with top coat over top coat of high-gloss varnish. Like a rathskeller on steroids. And as you walk about you see the rathskeller rooms down there mixed up with a game room and humongous bedroom, both designed and decorated as though they were upstairs, update and upgraded. The trimwork carries throughout all the rooms, mostly dark-stained and shiny . . . some painted here and there. Go around and around for a while and get confused by the undisciplined separation of sightlines and walklines. The muck made of style, of design, of one very expensive build out. You can stand in rathskeller-central replete with dark red brick flooring, and look right into a white-painted room with its ping-pong table and what-all. Now, the home looks like a mumbo-jumbo heap of ideas gone amuck, dislocates any sense of continuity or belonging between the floors, disassociates living areas to an extreme extent, feels uncomfortable, unpatterned, stoopid. The basement area build out screams, "The home designer had an identity crisis that slopped over onto this design project." (The cost of this beauty was well over $125/sq. ft.)
So, you old goat, are you saying you can't have a bar and dark-stained panels in the basement? Nope. The AG is ok with bars. He's ok with dark panels. He's ok with basements, too. (The AG even likes theme rooms and areas, believe it or not.) But let discretion be your friend. Deal with different areas differently. Does every room in your home look like your kitchen? Dress up an area if it suits you. AN AREA. Make spaces that are discrete, that standalone, that are different, getaway-places if it suits you. And while you're at it, very seriously consider representing what the eye most expects, what the mind most looks forward to in moving about your home - cleanly, crisply satisfy that expectation if you will, or surprise it. But don't confuse it. Mumbo-jumbo design. Egad!
These are a couple of correlatives to the geezer's viewpoint here. He doesn't like doors blocking passage to the down stairway. And he thinks that the down stairway should be finished just exactly as any other finished, interior stairway.
This is a derivative to the geezer's viewpoint. Any designing of space should squarely target individuation, distinction, easy discernment, identity. Form follows function. So a room for sitting and relaxing ought to have sitting and relaxing associations designed into it, e.g., fireplace (plenty of very high-efficiency gassers these days to choose from), bookcases, cozy lighting, etc. If it's an entertainment area you're looking to build out, then you'd better work extra hard to fit in a sink, counter, maybe a refrigerator/icemaker, some means to warm food if not cook it, etc. If it's a bedroom, then you'd better have a bathroom if you haven't seen to it already.
Underdesigning is the basement mistake du jour. Looks like a basement. Feels like a basement. Smells like a basement. It's a dark, dank, and dreary space (any two out of three will qualify) pretending to be a real room or two. On the fly, may be that's all you can do. For considerably more thought and likely not much more money, you can have real rooms and not fake it. Two home building and design keys to getting a basement room out of a basement space: insulation/ventilation and lighting. Read on.
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Ceilings - hard or soft?
Toughie. The AG's mechanical side says, "Don't you dare cover up areas to which you may need access in times to come, places that'll leak on you, places for wires to go, gas lines, whatever." The design side of the AG says, "Put in the value. Hard ceilings are the way the other ceilings in this home are finished. What are you waiting for?"
For years, the mechanical side won out. Soft ceilings meant quick, nondisruptive, easily closeable-uppable access. And, relative to hard ceilings, i.e., to wallboard ceilings, soft or suspended ceilings were cheap, easy and clean to install. For years.
Boys and girls, it hurts the old duffer to hang up his trusty, true-blue facts of home building life, but . . . well . . . gosh, it's hard to get this out . . . the AG's grown partial to wallboard ceilings. It's about the value. It's about cheap and easy, too. Forget about clean.
If the AG's to be honest about design consistency, he's got little choice in staying with soft ceilings. And you can do so much more with sheetrocked ceilings, particularly in respect to trimming out and concealed backlighting and indirect lighting. Those are value statements.
Nowadays, maybe the "cheap" criterion doesn't work so well with the advent of highly stylized tiles. But easy still works. And so does clean — there is no home building trade on this planet that makes a bigger mess of things than sheetrockers.
The immaculate conversion from soft to hard ceilings was not an overnight, intellectual twitch. The accessibility argument has not gone away entirely, but the AG has learned over many years that to his satisfaction a well-planned basement build out can cut the accessibility uncertainties down to life-size and smaller.
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Work out high- and low-voltage wiring carefully and lay the lines. |
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Securely wrap water lines – yes, cold and hot – and the gas lines – you heard it here first – the gas lines, in order to guard against condensation dripping and staining long term. |
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Always allow for physical access to valves and j-boxes. |
The "easy" criterion has fallen by the wayside since the old AG has reconciled himself to hiring young studs to hang, tape, and finish wallboard. The AG simply follows the finish work with his own sometimes to get surfaces up to a higher standard.
"Clean" still works in favor of suspended ceilings. Some things never change.
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Walls?
This is really a story about insulation. For stud walls, just arrange it so that the vapor barrier backing faces into the to-be (or already) heated, to-be-occupied room. For concrete or block walls, it's a continuous cover of 6-plus mil poly sheet, sealed tightly to the walls at top and bottom and at the sheets' laps. Then stud-wall and insulate the stud bays — again facing inward.
Do this with discipline and you will well on your way to foregoing the smell you know means "I am a basement."
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Floors?
Masonry's cold – tile, marble, other natural or ceramic finish. Floor prep is minimal. Heated masonry's pricey and effective. Rugs help a lot. Really beautiful rugs help a whole lot.
Vinyl's cheap, quick, and easy . . . and often looks it.
Carpet has a lot of appeal to the AG. Cheap, quick, and easy, too. Myriad styles, colors, designs, etc., etc., etc. And it is warmer than most anything else around for flooring. (The AG does not hanker for cold feet. His. Anybody really, really nearby.)
Wood. Plastic and prefinished hardwoods are the cat's meow these days. (Dated the old boy, didn't it?) The former still looks phony to the AG. The latter can be tricky, especially on even moderately uneven surfaces. If you've got any concerns of hydrostatic pressure – water getting into the basement when it rains, in the spring, anytime – forget wood. Got a dry basement? Some have used a dry-laid poly sheet with 3/4" ply subfloor ramset, and a standard-thickness floor over the top — either prefinished or to-be.
Nothing's all plus or all minus. Style, consistency, function all are operative.
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Lighting?
Go for it. As far as you can. Stretch. Especially accent lighting – corners, walls, farther away places, behind things, indirect, halo, under shelves, inside niches. Dramatic. Consider landscape-set lighting.
The farther away you get from natural light in your basement, the harder you work at lighting.
Get a professional to help you. Someone who'll talk with you, work with you, not push you along into anything, show you the ropes (so to write, no pun intended).
You must work this lighting thing completely before you start building, absolutely before you close up the walls and ceilings.
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Example.
Here's a basement unadorned. The exterior walls (WLs) are either concrete (CONC) or stud. All the interior (INT) WLs are stud. The floor is CONC. There's a staircase linking the main floor. There's a walkout, stone patio below a main floor deck. The basement's longest overall dimensions are a little over 40' on a square. The AG reckons unfinished basements like a painting hand-outlined. You're stuck with the exterior (EXT) perimeter (PRM) just as the painter is stuck with a canvas only so large. The windows (WDWs) and INT WLs, the stairs and plumbing stubs are like sketched lines and reference points.
This is a walkout, or sunshine basement, the western and some of the southern EXTs of which are at or near EXT grade. This is the classical "as was" pic, roughed and ready for mature thought and experienced consideration.
What shall we do with it? Well, what's its use in this home?
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Entertainment and relaxation. |
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Maybe a business office, possibly convertible to a bedroom. |
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Storage. |
What's the style of the rest of the home?
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Open - with selective, private space. |
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Heavily carpentered in chair rail, panel, columns, faux beams, and pilasters. |
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Generally bright colors, contrasting. |
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Floors are a mix of hardwood, unsculpted carpet, Chinese sculpted rugs, and Italian marble. |
What to do? What to do?
Piece of cake.
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The east end is darkest, most distant from staircase and EXT entry, holds a furnace and air handler. That's the storage area. That middle section is too longish anyway easily manage into something useful, integral. |
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The drain stubs always limit you to fix the bath in that given locale — or chop the floor and run pipes laterally (almost never recommended by the AG). We can get a full bath in that area one way or another, reckoning the only truly fixed spot is the floor drain slightly west of the downpipe. That's got to be where we set the toilet. We're freer in setting the shower bath or tub, freer still in setting a lavatory or two. |
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The small area at the northwest is ideal for an office. It's ideal for its sequester, proximity to a bath, EXT WL sufficient to take its own entryway if need be, and convertibility to a bedroom, once we reckon a closet which opens to this room. |
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The southern area and the central area are chopped apart by that long stud wall running east-west. Let's take that sucker out, and put in a couple of columns to help hold up the southside of this home. (Actually, the AG would restructure this wall line to be self-supporting, i.e., in no real need of columnar support.) |
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We've got room for more windows, so let's add some to increase natural light. |
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That EXT door will get to be wrong in both its placement and size. As-is, or existing (EXG), placement will appear an afterthought once its proximate, INT WL goes away. Its size will be dinky in all that open wall space. We'll move it, enlarge it, and brighten it up with more glass. You'll see. |
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Entertainment areas mean a wet bar if we can hack it, a fireplace, a bookcase or two. Hmmm. |
Tall order? Nah. All in a day's work (or maybe a couple of days') in the fun-filled life of the Autocad Granddad.
(What we'll pass on for the time being is any reference to all the finishing house plan details, you know, the coffers, panels and other carpentered trim. We'll stick exclusively to basics of home design, with the finishing left to the back of our mind's eye for now.)
This is the chrysalis, the metamorphosis. WLs coming down, WLs going up, WDWs in, WDWs out, DRs in, DRs out. We'll make a bath and hall out of open space, ending up with a CLO each for the bath and office/bedroom. The wet bar will take advantage of the dead space south of the toilet stub to the proximate WL southward. The east end will go to storage. The center and south end will be wide open. We'll add natural light to the south end with another WDW and to the west end with French doors and WDWs.
There are some house plan details worth working out and writing about once you've seen the end in plan view; however, keep in mind the objective: designwise, respect the rest of the home. Open. Light. Selectively private.
What hath we wrought?
One fine basement build out hath been wrought. Again, without the trimmings, let's take a long look.
Either coming down the stairs or entering through the at-grade French doors, we enter an elongated central area that is open and well-lighted naturally. The western end, aka Sunroom, can be a quiet place, contemplative to a degree, but not entirely cut off from the action. Dropping the wall (dotted line) and adding a couple of columns really spreads out space.
The more formal sitting area at the southern end features a west wall of windows, two built-in bookcases and a fireplace centered on the south wall. (The two red rectangles on the southeast and southwest ends of the room are pilasters in-the-making.) This southern area can be arranged to deal with almost entertainment situation from big screen entertainment to chic lounging. Coupled with the central area to its north, you have a fabulous entertainment suite in the making, complete with wet bar. (In time, there is nothing to rearranging the wet bar area into a kitchenette setup — a serious consideration in extended family life.) The central area is also capacious enough for the ubiquitous pool table either as a Bar table with 48" cues or a Regulation Table or Billiard Table with 42" cues.
At its east end, our basement still retains roughed storage area of size behind the double-doors and a smaller utility room area to its north.
The grouping and segmentation of space to the north of the central area is quite an accomplishment. Down a central hallway we have three doors to different spaces. The first, to the left, is smallish closet for casual hanging. Farther down to the left, there's a private space for an office or bedroom. In either instance, its west wall could be converted to French door entry, too. On the hallway's right, there's a full bath: double sink, one-person shower, linen closest, and a bog secreted behind a knee wall. (You all should know here and now that among the many, many absolute failures of design, indeed near the top of the AG's long list, is the failure to arrange a bathroom so that a passerby can inevitably espy the can. Hate it. Can't stand the sight. The geezer is not so retentive as to demand that the porcelain be put in its own room, but for crying out loud, get it out of my common sightlines.) Note, too, that off the bath is a walk-in closet with about 15' of racking.
Finally, to add flexibility to this office/bedroom and bath space, it can be entirely closed off to the rest of its proximate area with a pocket door. Selective privacy.
As an aside, all passageways are either 3'-0" or 6'-0".
That's how it done, boys and girls. That's a basement that a) is consistent with the structure and style and feel of the rest of the home, b) distinguishes spaces, c) allows for the flexibility of function so often lacking particularly in entertainment areas, d) surprises here and there (especially once we begin the finishing work) but never confuses.
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In your quest for basement remodeling ideas, try this site: Basement Remodeler: Innovations in Basement Remodeling. http://www.basementremodeler.com/INDEX.HTM
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