Adding a basement apartment – Our DIY House Renovations

Walls and door

This is a continuation of the series of our renovations to our basement; turning it into an apartment. Last article I wrote about doing the flooring. You can read that here.

After finishing the floor, the next part of our basement renovation was to add a door and some walls to block off the apartment from the rest of our basement and living space. My father-in-law Doug helped me a lot with everything. He worked in framing years ago and is very detail oriented, which was a huge help.

The first step we took was to cut out the drywall and studs to make way for the door. While cutting, we ran into a problem. The bottom of the wall had a piece of concrete and metal sticking out about a foot from the ground. This was going to make it more difficult than we had anticipated. We prepared for a long hard day of work, but after cutting off the metal piece, we realized it was just cinder block.

Within a few minutes we had knocked the cinder block out and were super relieved! Because they were cinder blocks, there were some holes that needed to be filled to level it along the ground. We used concrete to fill the holes and then Doug cut a piece of metal which we used as the threshold.

Once everything was cut and where we wanted it to be, we hung the door. We made sure to buy a wider door than normal because we knew tenants would be moving big furniture into the room and we wanted to avoid having dings on the wall.

Next we framed the walls. This didn’t take too long, but did require some meticulous planning to make sure everything was where we wanted it to be. Doug’s expertise really came in handy here.

Once the walls were framed we hung the drywall. My dad came into town to help with this as well and my sister’s fiance, Steven, who was a big help. Because it was only a wall and not the ceiling, it wasn’t too hard to hang the drywall and we got it done fairly quickly. We also got some help from a family friend to help tape and joint the drywall, which was very helpful and we were very grateful for!

We could have done all of this on our own, but the help made things go much more smoothly and made the process a whole lot less stressful! Having help was huge for us getting it done in a timely manner and done well, but if you are considering doing this yourself, don’t feel that you have to have expert help! All you really need is a plan, patience and to watch all the YouTube videos and you’ll be golden!

Let us know what you think of our renovations in the comments below! If you have any extra questions about what we did, feel free to comment below or email us at thefundfamily@gmail.com