Planning and Design for a Basement Finish in Riverton
Hello, Caleb with Dansie Design Build. Today, we’re starting a new basement finish project; I wanted to give you a tour to tell you about our plans for the basement. The basement will get a walkout entry and be remodeled into a basement apartment. The completed basement finish will include the following:
- Kitchen
- Bathroom
- A Couple of Bedrooms
- Laundry Room
Basement Floor Plan
If you’re looking at the floor plans, you will see the basement walkout entry outside, the living room, and an L-shaped kitchen. The kitchen has a window centered above the sink, fridge, range, an upright kitchen cabinet for the pantry, and a 7’x 3’9″ island in the center of the kitchen. We also have a laundry room with cabinets on both sides of the washer and dryer, two bedrooms, and a bathroom with a 6′ vanity, toilet, and tub.
Hybrid System Feature for a Basement Apartment
So this basement will have an exciting feature: a hybrid system so they can rent the unit out or not. A staircase goes upstairs with a door and deadbolt so the tenant can lock it off. The door will be soundproof too. The same setup will be on the other side so the primary owner can lock off the home’s central section. If the owners put deadbolts on the doors and shut them, they could access their storage and mechanical areas on their side of the basement. The renters or people living downstairs can access their apartment through the walkout door.
If they want to leave these unlocked, they could reaccess the whole house with a key change. So that’s what we have going on for the layout here.
Reconfiguring Walls for the Mechanical Room and Bathroom
Then, we have the mechanical room. We’ve put some tape down preliminarily before we chalk our lines for building the walls. There’s going to be this closet, too, because it is a little bit larger than needed. We’re also moving a load-bearing wall 6 inches because it’s required to fit the tub in the bathroom. So you have to have five feet of space between each side of the framed walls, and adding some framing inside of the wall reduces the area to less than five feet. So we’ve got that worked out with the engineering, and to move the load-bearing wall; in the bathroom, we’ll cut out all the concrete flooring, reconfigure the drain pipes to work for the tub, and then have a toilet and vanity.
Kitchen Floor Plan
In the kitchen, we want to center the sink in the middle of the window. So, we must establish exactly where the kitchen wall needs to be, so the summation of all the cupboards adds to the center of the wall. So we’ve got our laser line showing a vertical line straight down from the center of the window. Based on the cabinet plan, we measure where those cabinets will end up to make our L-shaped kitchen, centered with the sink in the middle of that window, and then turn the corner, so we know exactly where to put that wall.
How Do You Locate High Areas of the Floor?
The laser also shows us where the floor is high and low. We have the flooring being LVP, so to minimize the number of areas where there’s a clicking sound from the LVP having a low spot and hitting the concrete, we’re going to locate all the areas of the floor that need to be adjusted or ground down.
No basement floors are perfect, but here, you can see that the laser is showing that we have right about two and a half inches higher than the rest of the floor, in some places, three inches. So we’ll identify all those places that need to be ground down; a crack is essentially a high spot everywhere. So the laser helps us determine which areas are high and how high they are so we can get them all dialed in perfectly, so the floor ends up being flat.
Conclusion
So that’s what we’re up to this week; getting the flooring ready, grinding the flooring down, laying out the cabinet plan, and then snapping all the lines for where the framing will happen. So thanks for tuning in to see the basement apartment in Riverton, Utah.
Contact Dansie Design Build
If you need help with your basement apartment or finishing your basement, contact us. Also, check out our resources page; we have information for you to download. Have an excellent rest of your day!
