New and Improved Isearch Background

As a child, I remember my great aunt and uncle’s house being built. They were from Rhode Island and had moved up here to enjoy retirement and to be closer to family. The basement was left unfinished with nothing more than a wood boiler and a work bench for my uncles tinkering. As the years came and went, unfortunately so did my great aunt and uncle. The house was then given to her granddaughter and here small family who quickly took up residence. By the way, this house was not a large one. Sure it had a spacious living room and kitchen but the bed rooms were tiny, like how do you fit a bed and a dresser in there tiny. They quickly got to rearranging things by making the two small bedrooms into one larger one, great for mom and dad but, what about their daughter? She made out best of all with a full, finished apartment in the basement, a teenagers dream come true. Sure, she still lived with her folks but barely. Her own living room, bathroom, and master bed room. There was no kitchen but she didn’t need it anyway, all she had to do was go up stairs and see what mom and dad were eating. The same thing with laundry, go use their washer, and so on.

Recapping on these events now, years later I’ve realized that my current lack of space problem could easily be solved by going down instead of up or sideways like I had original thought. An addition would provide some of the space I need but would also be much more expensive. The price of digging a hole and putting in a frost wall alone would be about the same cost as a basement remodel. By staying in the basement I can increase the floor space of the house by nearly 2/3 at a fraction of the cost. So far it looks like I can build three rooms. One will be a larger bedroom for my oldest son, he is excited about having a bedroom down stairs and wants to take part in designing it. Another room will be a utility room for laundry and our old reliable desktop computer. The final room will be for storage, we have so much junk that we don’t need yet can’t seem to part with. Now I’ll have a place to put it all. Putting rooms in a basement would be a lot less expensive than an addition and with my experience in carpentry could be done by myself. I can also set the pace according to my schedule.

Back in high school I took part in a building construction program offered by the local tech. school. Our teacher was a lifelong carpenter and he knew every last trick in the book. In the class we worked on several different projects including building an addition to a house from the ground up. The knowledge I gained from this particular project will be the most helpful in the basement project because it covers about 90% of the things I’ll need to do. My cousin and I built a camp on the coast a few years back and that was a good refresher of my carpentry skills that I haven’t used since high school. I’ve also done a lot of remodeling in the upstairs portion of the house slowly over the last few years that have involved finish carpentry work and attention to detail. I have all the skill sets I’ll need to do most of the framing and finish work but, still have a lot of unanswered questions.