I’ve got a nice basement, but still dream of upgrades.
My dream basement has a two-lane regulation bowling alley; swimming pool with steam room and jacuzzi; maybe 6 high-end video games; 9-foot billiards table; 12-seat home theater with 10-foot high-def screen; putting green; the top 100 board games; mahogany and leather library, separate 50s-era hamburger stand (with jukebox); office with T3 Internet connection; and 1965-era Barbara Eden running on a treadmill in the chrome-and-mirror fitness club.
Yours?
I just designed and built mine. It’s got a home office with indirect lighting and separate workstations for myself, my wife, and kid, a games room with an 8-foot pool table and a wet bar, a bathroom with a four person sauna, a hobby room for doing crafts, models, etc., and a soundproofed home theater with two rows of elevated seating and a 10’ projection screen. Every room is wired for sound and computers, with computer-controlled lighting in the theater.
I did all the design, electrical wiring, automation/networking, framing, and all the finish work in the theater. We hired people do put up the drywall, the carpet and tile, and to do the plumbing.
I have a web page that shows some of the design and construction, primarily of the theater: My Home Theater.
I don’t have any good finished photos yet, but here’s one of the theater looking from the entrance, taken while I was installing the surround speakers: Theater front.
Let’s talk about the outside walls and drainage. That’s the bane of countless basements. Make the dug hole big enough to work on the outside of the wall after it’s built. On the wall itself, start with gooey, tarry sealer, then rubber or plastic sheeting, then sprayed on urethane foam. At the bottom of the trench, lay in perforated drain pipe connected to someplace downhill. Drop at least 3 ft. of crushed stone on top of the pipe, then fill in with soil.
If you have a sump pump, have a backup, automatically started generator for it. Basement floodings happen during big rainstorms. Power failures happen, that’s right, during big rainstorms.
Now that you’ve warded off the water, you can dream about the inside.
Mine would have five rooms, but not require as much space as that might sound like it might.
Room one would be the billiards hall and bar/mini-kitchen, with a TV and a jukebox. There’d also be a card table for poker/hearts/M:TG/whatever.
Room two would be the arcade. Nothing expansive, but there’d have to be a couple of pinball machines. And Street Fighter II. And Tekken. And Soul Caliber II. And if I could find it, an old game called Chiller (anyone else remember this game? I’ve only ever seen this very un-P.C. game in one place, the arcade in the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, NJ, and that was 15 years ago).
The arcade would have to, of course, be poorly lit and kept just this side of too cold for comfort. Oh, and smoking is allowed.
Room three would be the LAN room. Two opposite walls would bear long tables, each holding several PC’s built for competitive and co-op gaming sessions.
Room four would be the “theater”. Projector TV, DVD player, surround sound, theater seating… the works.
Room five would be the bathroom, because who the hell would want to have to go upstairs?
Our basement is a modest “family room”, with a little kitchen and a bathroom with a shower. I’m happy with it, but I’d really like direct outside access. There should be more than one way to get out of any room in your house, I think.
A “house” is defined as a roof over a model railroad. Just leave the whole damned area clear and let me go to work for the next 20 years. Perfect, thanks.
My dream basement would have a nine-foot ceiling, to accomodate a “floating” set of three rooms - a recording studio and control room, and a listening / home theater room with digital editing suite. These would all be physically isolated from each other and from the house, soundproofed, and have folded HVAC ducts above the ceilings (so sound doesn’t travel through the ductwork to the rest of the house). There would be a recreation room with pool table and stuff, a full bathroom with hot tub, a small kitchen, and a freight elevator to facilitate moving instruments and amplifiers from inside the garage to the basement and vice versa. I think we’d have to drop in the Steinway by helicopter before the house was built, but hey, if I could afford all the other stuff, a helicopter would be spare change!
Then I’d spend the rest of my life developing my studio tan.
Room one: Small office with a better computer than I currently have, good speakers, lots of books, and lots of nice quiet conducive-to-writing ambiance, plus a minifridge and munchies.
Room two: A matted floor, freestanding punching bag, room to store my martial arts weapons, and a few small weights for strength training. The ceiling (unlike in my current basement) would be high enough for me to jump rope.
Room three: A library. Floor-to-wall shelving, and a small gnome who would keep all my books in order for me, and be able to tell me right off what book whatever I’m looking for is in (e.g., no more mumbling that it’s ‘in that book about politics…’, which describes about half my books). There would be very comfortable chairs, lots of candles, and a small stereo.
I like my basement a lot. It is very large and I have a comfortable Rec Room which consist of a Den with a 32” and 19” TV sets. Carpeted. I have a old Bally’s Pinball Machine from 1970 that I rebuilt myself. I also have shelving units for Board Games.
Next is the 9’ Antique Pool table with enough room that you can’t hit a wall with the cues.
Next is a large 11-foot Train table with a hanging circular track and village and my son’s layout under the table lit by white Xmas lights. This section also as a large storage rack that fits all my Xmas decoration, camping gear and etc.
I have pallets layout on top of bricks in case of flooding for large item storage.
Then the bulk of my basement is separated off by a sheetrock wall and Fanfold doors. (I built it but I haven’t finished it yet.) This back area is my work shop. I have a 12’x4’ Workbench and a 6’x3’ Work table. All my power tools and lots of storage.
I ran 4 circuits in the basements to provide plenty of power everywhere and I added a lot more lights.
I have a walk out to the backyard from the shop end of the basement.
I am working each year on improving the water tightness of the basement. I hope in another 4 years to be waterproof.
In the Game and Den areas I also have all my old posters from by teens and 20’s. It was nice to put them back up.
I like my basement, I still have more to do, but it is mostly there.
This is make believe Sam. You weren’t supposed to actually go out and build it.
Seriously, that sounds cool. My house is being reconstructed after a massive tree strike and I realized that I have the skills and the imagination to do some pretty cool stuff too. Nothing as good as that though.
You might surprise yourself. My construction skills are very modest. I learned electrical wiring doing my last basement, and I think I had painted two walls in my entire life until now. I had never done any framing, and I never even owned a power saw. It was strictly a ‘learn as you go’ kind of project. Once you get into it, it’s not as hard as you’d think.
I’d been noodling around with CAD drawings of my ‘dream’ basement for years, and when we finally bought our new house, finding just the right unfinished basement layout was one of the prime drivers (the real estate agents thought I was nuts. They’d show us a house, and the first thing I’d do was head for the unfinished basement space).
It was actually very hard finding the right basement. It had to have 9’ ceilings, and open spaces big enough for a pool table and a theater. That’s actually pretty tough to find, because you need an unbroken space at least 13’ X 17’ for a decent sized pool table, and another one at least 12’ by 20’ for a two-row theater. And we couldn’t afford a giant house (ours is about 2600 sq ft, which isn’t small, but isn’t a mansion, either). But I got lucky and found one that matched, and it also had a walk-out basement, which was one of my ‘really nice to have’ features.
So, we bought the house, and I eagerly started framing. Then once the framing was up, I hung my projector and screen to ‘test out’ the theater. Once I could watch movies, construction stopped… for almost 3 years. It was one of those ‘burst of energy, then burn out’ things I’m really good at. Eventually I got sick of staring at open framing and hired some drywallers and finish guys so it would force me to get to work.
It actually wasn’t all that expensive to do it all. Doing your own labor saves a bundle.
