Adding a basement apartment – Our DIY House Renovations

Tara and I bought our house knowing that we would need to renovate a few things, especially with our aspirations to become real estate investors. That included adding a kitchen to our basement. We don’t have the money to pay others to renovate for us, so it was DIY house renovations for us.

Let me start by saying that Tara and I have very little experience in renovating a house. We relied heavily on the experience of others, mainly our dads, and tons of YouTube videos. It has been a really good experience for us and we were surprised at how fun it has been.

We will make a couple different articles that outline everything we have done. This article will highlight the flooring that we did.

The floor

The first thing we started with was tearing up the existing carpet. The room was around 200 square feet of entirely carpet. It was easy to actually tear up the carpet, but was difficult to move the carpet out of the room because it was so heavy.

The first thing we started with was tearing up the existing carpet. The room was around 200 square feet of entirely carpet. It was easy to actually tear up the carpet, but was difficult to move the carpet out of the room because it was so heavy.

To my surprise, there was linoleum underneath the carpet.  🙁 We had already bought some wood-look tile so there wasn’t any reason to keep the linoleum. One half of the linoleum had a black glue that made the square pieces pop up really easy. The other half used a different glue and was clumped together, making it extremely difficult to get off. I spent a few hours hacking away at it with a floor scraper before enlisting the help of my brother, who probably saved my sanity. Once the linoleum was all ripped up, I got rid of all the carpet tacks and nails.

For the tile, I enlisted my dad’s help. He’s a stone mason and has had some experience with laying tile. He came from Idaho for a weekend and we finished it all that Saturday. Again, I was surprised at how much fun I had doing this. A few days later, we finished it off by adding the grout and cleaning it. It turned out better than we had hoped and we are very proud of our work!

The Final Product

I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate the help I got from my family! Corbin, Rocky, Gabby and Austin! Thank you guys!

The next part in this series will go into adding a door and painting the walls. Be sure to check it out next week! Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment below. If you haven’t already, feel free to subscribe to our blog. Thanks again!