Let's finish a basement: Getting started

My family has decided it's time to finish our basement. When we bought the house we new this would be on our project list. We've lived in our home for almost 6 years and now that our kids are getting bigger it's getting a little cramped. We figured the easiest way to add space is to make the space we already have livable.

First things first. My husband and I are DIY-ers. We are not professionals, but we do have professionals in our family who have all the answers to our many questions. Since we are tackling this basement remodel together and it's our first big project, we have a ton of questions.

Next sit down as a "team" and come up with a design. We (my husband & I) scoured the Internet looking for a website that would allow us to design our own floor plan and we wanted it to be free. We found a couple, but the one we decided to use for this project was  www.floorplanner.com

www.floorplanner.com

Floor planner is a easy to use site that allowed us to enter our measurements and play around with wall placement. As you can see it also allowed us to put furniture pieces to show the flow of the rooms.

www.floorplanner.com

After we were finished measuring all the walls and drawing it to scale we waited. And waited. We saved our $ and waited some more, until finally we had a budget in place to work with.

Follow me as I take you on our journey of finishing a basement into a family entertainment area.

Next up: sealing cement and painting brick. Oh what fun!