My Basement Renovation: The Master Plan

The master plan for my basement renovation is that there is no real master plan. Just a bunch of ideas, measurements, and images in my head. I know I will be renovating the entire basement in two phases. Phase one, which is well underway at the time of this writing, is the “front half” of the house. The footprint is a rectangle about 20′ x 55′. The section of the basement I’m starting with is about 20′ x 30′.



The house was built in 1908 and I have a bit of a height limitation. The designers felt fine about ten foot ceilings on the main floors, but only left 7′ in the basement. Low ceiling basements in older homes are quite common so I’m sure many can relate. Add to the 7′ basement height an a/c duct and support beam running lengthwise about 5 feet from one wall and things get tricky. I managed to come up with as many tricks as I could to save headroom.

The general plan for the basement renovation was to gut most of the old drywall and insulation (the room had been renovated I would guess in the 80′s and the craftsmanship was very poor on the drywall). Tear down the entire basement popcorn ceiling and replace the single, center of the room light with recessed cans. Then I would build out a wall to recess a nice tv with built in 7.1 surround in the walls/ceiling.  It would be a mixed-use room consisting of kids playroom and media/theater/a-v room in one.

There also existed a 250 gallon oil tank that was no longer in use. It took up about 3′ x 7′ in a corner so removing it was the very first step in this basement renovation. The next was to deal with the steep, crooked, squeaky, dangerous, narrow basement staircase. That was were the renovation really started and is the subject of the first post.

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Beginning the Basement Renovation: New Basement Staircase

Room Layout, Floorplan, and Framing Begins

Framing for the Middle Atlantic Rack

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Basement Renovation: Drywall Begins

Finishing the Drywall

Middle Atlantic SRS4 Rack

Cleaning up the Basement HVAC Duct

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Installing Ceiling Surround Speakers

sealing basement floor

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Closing up A/V Rack Closet

Carpet Installation

A Couple of Screen Shots...

Some More Shots Post-Carpet

FInal Rack Addition: XBOX360