The Basement it is a ch-ch-Changin!

Yes you read that right, after just 6 months of home ownership and we are making our first big stamp on the place.  What you ask is that change, why getting our basement in rental condition - yes siree we want to the uber cute Scott McG says 'take cheques to the bank'!

From the get go, one of the big selling features on our house was the 'easy' conversion to a basement income suite.  So we saved our pennies for the last few months, sorted out the master vision for the space, oh yeah.... and got permission from our city hall to get 'er done.

Before I get into what we are doing to the basement (yup we are already more than 1/2 way through the reno process!), let's take a peek at the plans shall we.
This, is what we inherited with the house.

As you can see we started out with some key features:

• seperate entrance (woop woop!)
• good sized rooms (okay the bathroom is suuuper pokey, but the others are good
• existing plumbing
• big windows (it is only 1/2 undergroud so it has good large middle of the wall windows- such a treat!)

But, we were missing one key feature.... a kitchen - yeah who'da thunk a tenant needed a kitchen?!  So, we put on our thinking caps and came up with the new vision for our basement suite... ta dah.... this is the space that a future tenant at Casa Waffles will be able to enjoy.

We did a lot of brainstorming, measuring, pondering etc on what we wanted for today and in the future as our family hopefully will expand one day... as well as taking a hard look at the limitations of our house -- such as no realistic place for upstairs laundry, boo!

what we ended up with are the following modifications:

 

1. Remove the wall seperating the current laundryroom and hallway to make room for a nice sized kitchen (thanks Bro Guy for that stellar suggestion!)
2. Enlarge the "nook" in the current laundry room to make space for laundry
3. create two entrances into new laundry room to make it a shared space
4. Add an extra doorway into the beedroom - allowing us the ability to convert the 1 bedroom suite into a bachelor should we need a bit more space in the future
5. Put in a kitchen in the existing laundry space
6. spiff up the existing bathroom - new sink and toilet (buh bye rusty/faded rose) for a bit of a short term lipstick makeover
7. Other stuff
1. new flooring throughout - luxury vinyl plank floors?- from these guys??
2. Painting throughout
3. new lighting
4. more stuff... I can't think of at the mo'

Phew, see... there's been lots of secret plotting going on around here.  But, I'll be filling you in on all the details starting with the plan creation process this weekend!