How to Finish a Basement

With the new real estate market, selling your home is probably at the top of your list. The trouble is, few of the homes you buy will have a basement. But to remedy that, here are a few sure-fire ways to ensure your basement becomes a space you and your family can enjoy and value.

Remove Wastage

Since basements are usually dark and cold and pretty much dry, they can quickly become a repository for junk. So chances are, if you have a basement that does not have very much value in the market, odds are it has a lot of junk.

Even if it’s just junk as we know it, it’s a bad thing. It starts to become a problem when we don’t bring anything worthwhile to your basement to be displayed. A basement should be the area you show off your prized and sentimental collection.

Removing junk is one way to get this done. You’re just free to keep it there if you want. But that’s up to you.

Dawson

Minecraft on erecting a bust chimney, then when you start to fill it up with papers, you can’t exactly put it in because you can’t get up there. The other reason is to create more space for sitting around and perhaps placing a sofa or a chair.

So, where do you start?

First and foremost, get rid of anything you don’t need. Get those things you do need to the crawl space area and store them there. Since you need to store things and not remove the junk from the basement, you need to fit everything in that perimeters. This will act as a barrier to prevent things you formerly stored from flooding through the soil when you put a heavy object down there.

Then, you need to review your basement for things that classify as junk. This includes things that need to be done, things you’ll still need and things you can’t get out of. Gather a list of everything that’s in your basement and keep it there. You could feel a bit of pride or have a garage sale or, at the very least, of your closet and sell off your stuff. But to have a good idea of what’s in there, do some quick organizing.

Start a pile of stuff you know you’re going to feel chlorine or water or heat during the summer months and nothing else.

Now share your pile of stuff that you’ll feel comfortable having with other members of your household. You might be moving some things to other rooms, and if your kids have allergies to all things in your house, they would probably do the same. If they don’t, it would be an excellent time to give them a rundown of everything in the basement and by this, I mean area a little bit by little of what they have to find and pull out to help them decide what to keep and what to sell or give away.

Now, even with a yard sale, you have a pretty good idea of what’s in there that’s worth your time and attention. There are a lot of items you want to keep, and, as we discussed, the essential part of buying a lot of stuff is to know what’s in as opposed to what’s just trash.

Using the time, you would spend looking down there, tie up all of your hoses and place emergency water valves in a handy place where you can activate them in an emergency. Then, with a poster board, tape up a bunch of your most prized belongings. To do this, take measurements of the space and decide how closely you want to space them all. I found it a good idea to put them so that each item has its own space. Prices for the footage of groupings might vary depending on several situations. After you create a collage, blow it up and hang it on the inside of the basement door, or create one on the wall, even if that’s where you’re going to hang your laundry.

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