The Basement Part 1: Planning and Layout
It's time to finally start the basement renovation! Well that's not quite the truth; we attempted to start it last year and hired a friend to frame up a few of the walls. We were juggling so many other projects at the time though and never really followed up after that. Anyway, Chris had some vacation time he needed to use up, so we're making a real push to get it done! This is the first space we've essentially started from scratch with. Given that it's such a large project, we'll be posting progress in stages.
One of the things we were looking for in a home was an open basement I could use as a home photo studio. Most of my shoots are on location, but I wanted the ability to shoot quick portraits and small groups in a space that I could just leave my lights set up.
In this house, the basement was split. Half of the basement was "finished" as a rec room while the unfinished area had the washer, dryer and hot water boiler. I use quotes around "finished' because it was clearly done by your stereotypical handyman. Terrible plastering, coaxial cables sloppily run along baseboards, twisted framing, etc.
Before we started the project, we made a list of what we needed to accomplish in the space to better grasp how we would need to rework the rooms and if we could salvage any of the work that was already done (spoiler alert: no, we couldn't):
- Large area for a photo studio
- Lockable gear storage area with outlets for charging batteries
- Sitting area for clients
- Mini built in standing work station with ethernet and power
- Storage, storage and more storage
- Laundry area with storage
- Small workshop area
- Has to be a creative, modern space
- Did I mention storage?
After talking through a bunch of ideas and sketching a ton of plans, we finally decided on how we were going to make the space work. We would take down the wall separating the small room and unfinished area and build a new wall which would set the footprint for the laundry room and unfinished workshop. We planned on keeping the load bearing columns where they were and boxing them in (the black circles in the image). This will leave two posts in the middle of our studio which is not ideal, but it's not in our budget to remove them and replace them with an I-beam.
We noticed that some of the vapour barrier on the unfinished side was not sealed. It was just hanging there, flapping in the breeze! This made us worry about what kind of blunders were lurking behind the drywall on the finished side, so we also made the decision to demolish everything and start fresh. As mentioned previously, the drywall was horribly plastered anyway (see photo below). In addition to re-working the walls, we planned on re-insulating, doing a classic "Uncommon Law" treatment on the lighting situation and running low voltage wiring (speaker wires and CAT 6) .
Since our home is a side-split, there's a large crawl space with 3 foot ceilings. The space offers an amazing amount of storage but since the ceilings are so low it's incredibly hard to move around in. It works great for long term storage though - things you only need once a year like the Christmas decorations.
The original entrance to the crawl space was on the unfinished side of the basement. For better use of wall space in a soon-to-be small laundry room though, we decided to move the entrance to the studio side and have the access hidden within a built in cabinet.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Demolition soon!