Thinking about finishing your basement? Before you drop $30,000 (and that's on the low end) on drywall and carpet, let's talk about whether your basement is actually ready for it.
If you live in the Midwest like us, your basement probably holds your furnace, your water heater, your holiday decor, and a whole lot of potential. Who doesn't want more space? But here's our honest take: most basements aren't fit to be finished. The good news is that you don't need to finish yours to make it brighter, cleaner, drier, and a lot more usable.
In this episode of the How to Handyma'am podcast, we played a round of Fact or Fiction about finished basements, then shared 4 budget-friendly upgrades for the basement you actually have. Here's the written version.
This episode is dedicated to Emily's Aunt Kathy, the most giving, selfless, and pink-sparkle-loving aunt around. We love you!
Handy Vocab: Words You'll See in This Post
No prerequisite knowledge required. Here are the terms we use below.
Hydrostatic pressure: Pressure from water in the soil pushing against your foundation, which forces water through cracks and pores.
Egress window: A window big enough to climb out of in an emergency. It's required for a basement bedroom.
Efflorescence: The white, chalky stuff on basement walls. It's left behind when water moves through concrete and evaporates, so it's a sign of moisture.
Below grade: Any part of your house that's below ground level. The ground is called "grade," so anything under it is below grade.
Airless sprayer: A paint sprayer that pumps paint at high pressure through a small tip. It's fast, and great for big, hard-to-reach areas like a basement ceiling.
Fact or Fiction: Finished Basement Edition
"Drywall or waterproof paint on the inside walls stops basement leaks for good."
Fiction. In a battle between water and paint, water wins. If hydrostatic pressure is pushing water into your basement, no paint will stop it, no matter how good it is or how well it sticks. Some foundations also need to breathe, and sealing them up can cause condensation or peeling.
The only way to truly waterproof a basement is from the outside of the foundation. Those interior "waterproofing" systems aren't useless, but they're really water redirection systems. They move the water, they don't stop it.
"Fiberglass batts between the studs, right against the concrete, are the best way to warm up your basement."
Fiction. Warm, humid air from your own house hits the cold concrete, condenses inside the fiberglass, and you get hidden mold. Use rigid foam insulation instead. It keeps warm air from reaching the concrete, and if a little condensation does happen, it won't soak in and grow mold.
One more thing: if water is actively coming through your walls, don't cover them with anything. Fix the water first.
"If a basement room has a door and a closet, you can legally call it a bedroom."
Fiction. What makes a legal bedroom is an egress window, not a closet. Code doesn't care about closets one way or the other. It's about fire safety.
And an egress window isn't just a window big enough to fit through. You need to be able to get out of the window well and away from the house, so a deep well needs a ladder or steps.
"A clean, painted, semi-finished basement adds huge home value without the $30K price tag."
Mostly fiction. Appraisers usually count below-grade space separately from your main living space, at a lower value per square foot. So it won't do much for your appraisal. But a clean, dry, usable basement does help your home sell, and buyers may be willing to pay more for it even if the appraiser doesn't count it.
So, Should You Finish Your Basement?
Go for it if all of these are true:
It stays dry. Cleaning up mold and finishing over it won't fix the problem. We've been in plenty of finished basements that smell yucky.
It has the headroom. A lot of basements don't meet code for ceiling height.
You have the budget.
You have a reason. More living space or an extra bedroom (with an egress window!) is a great reason. Doing it for resale value isn't, because you probably won't get your money back.
If your basement doesn't check those boxes, don't worry. Here's how to make it better anyway.
4 Budget Upgrades for an Unfinished Basement
1. Light It Up
Add more light. On a budget, linkable shop lights plug in and string together. If bright white light isn't your thing, try warm-toned LEDs or plug-in swag lights with shades.
Paint the ceiling dark. A black or deep-colored ceiling makes the rest of the room feel brighter and visually hides all your mechanicals. (It can make the room feel a bit shorter, so go lighter if that bothers you.)
Paint the walls a light color so the space feels cleaner and bigger.
Spray, don't roll, the ceiling. Tape off the walls and use an airless sprayer. Sprayers are expensive, so rent one if it's a one-time project.
Wear a respirator. Basements don't get much fresh air, and sprayed paint goes everywhere.
2. Fix the Floor
Seal it. A clear concrete sealer helps keep some moisture out of your living space and stops the floor from tracking dust through your house.
Test before you paint. Tape a square of clear plastic to the floor, sealing all four sides so it's airtight. If there's condensation under it after a day, paint will peel.
Choose flooring you can pull up fast. If you ever get water, skip anything permanent. Foam puzzle mats or an outdoor rug you can hose off and dry out are perfect.
3. Win the Moisture War
Run a dehumidifier. Here's the hack: attach a hose and run it into your sump pump pit, so you never have to empty the bucket and it can run all the time.
Keep the air moving. Even a slow fan keeps the air from getting stale.
Ditch the cardboard. It soaks up moisture. Switch to clear plastic totes, and buy them on sale over time.
Set up your basement for the basement it is, not the basement you wish it was. You'll save yourself a lot of heartache.
4. Create Zones
Hang curtains from the ceiling. Ceiling-mounted curtain track with drop cloths works great, since drop cloths don't hold moisture (skip the velvet). Use them to hide your mechanicals and slide them open when it's time for service, keeping plenty of clearance around the equipment.
Divide with storage. Put your shelving in the middle of the room to split storage from a little living area or workshop.
Give everything a spot. Designated spaces make a basement feel more finished than any drywall.
Two Bonus Tips from Arly
Put a table next to your storage. You can open a tote, grab what you need, and pack it back up without hauling it upstairs.
Choose furniture with legs. A couch with 2 to 3 inch legs has a fighting chance if your basement floods. One without legs is going straight to the curb.
The Recap
Light it up, fix the floor, win the moisture war, and create zones. Over a few weekends, you can glow up your unfinished basement into usable space, without the $30K price tag or the heartbreak of flooded drywall.
Listen to the Full Episode
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Full Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and lightly edited, so it may contain small errors.
All right. Welcome back, folks. Welcome to How to Handyma'am, the podcast where we teach you how to plan for the basement you have, not the basement you wish you had. In this episode, we're talking about what qualifies for a finished basement, and then we give you four tips for semi-finishing your unfinished basement to make it a little brighter, a little cleaner, and a little more organized. And we start with a truly chaotic Three Minutes of Chaos today. I'm Emily. I'm Samantha. And I'm Arly.
This episode is dedicated to my Aunt Kathy, or my Aunt Katherine. First of all, she's the most giving and selfless person ever. And she also really loves pink, like pink sparkles, all that kind of stuff, and she still loves it even though she's in a house with three boys, counting her husband. She's a fantastic aunt and family member. She loves you hard and loyally, and I'm just blessed to have her in my life. Love you, Aunt Kathy. God bless all the aunts like Aunt Kathy.
Should we get into Three Minutes of Chaos? Let's do it chaotically.
The purpose of this podcast is to empower women to take care of their homes. Arly grew up handy, but my mom and I, six years ago, didn't have any of these skills or tools. We were you six years ago, so that tells you you absolutely can do every bit of what we're doing. We want to be able to bring in-person education to women, and the podcast is our vehicle to get us started.
Today for Three Minutes of Chaos, we're playing a game inspired by Good Hang with Amy Poehler, where she and Marcello Hernández each had one minute to speak on a topic they knew nothing about, and they had to act like an expert. So we're playing that game today. None of what you're about to hear is factual. Do not correct us. We are acting like experts on things we are most certainly not experts on.
Arly, I've been struggling to understand how computer code, ones and zeros, gets turned into actual applications we use, like Microsoft Word and Excel and solitaire on my phone. I heard you were an expert in this topic. Can you please explain how that works?
Yes. This might be a little too advanced, but I'll try to dumb it down. According to the Dewey Decimal System and a mixture of Morse code, computer science, and whimsical electronics, if you find yourself in a beginner coding class, you'll find that ones and zeros basically equate to electrons and photons. When you compute it in the computer, it's basically a code that electrifies your brain. The computer has a brain and a box of wonderment inside of it, and clicking ones and zeros is intertwining the electrodes and neurons of the computer system. Thank you. Expert in ones and zeros.
Okay, my topic? School is in session. It is spider mating rituals. Oh, Lord. So when the mommy spider and the daddy spider meet up, the daddy spider weaves a, let's say, very forward picture into his web, completely unsolicited, which men shouldn't do. And the mommy spider is like, whoa, okay, I like what I'm seeing. And then they make a baby. Always twins. I'm informed and troubled.
I would like you to tell me how I could go about making a new element on the periodic table. This is a very important skill for you to have, because in the zombie apocalypse, we might not have the tools to mine the elements needed for new electronics. Your kitchen is usually where you're going to find them. Cans of baked beans, canned tuna, canned chicken: they come out of the same factory and have little bits of the elements you need. First you run them through your paper shredder, then you crush them up, and then the two elements you need to make motherboards are left there. Well, you all have been educated. Do what you will with that information. Everyone's dumber than when they started.
Speaking of education, we're now doing a new segment called Handy Vocab before we talk about a topic, because we got some feedback that we sometimes use terms you have no context for. So we'll give the context at the beginning, and then the teaching will make more sense. Today, as you know, we're talking about whether your basement can be finished, and what to do to make it a little better if it can't.
Hydrostatic pressure: pressure from water in the soil pushing against your foundation, which forces water through cracks and pores. Egress window: a window big enough to climb out of in an emergency. It's required for basement bedrooms. Efflorescence: the white, chalky stuff on basement walls. It's left behind when water moves through the concrete and evaporates, so it's a sign of moisture. Below grade: any part of your house that's below ground level. The ground is called grade, so anything under it is below grade. And finally, one tool we'll talk about: an airless sprayer, a paint sprayer that pumps paint at high pressure through a small tip. It's fast and great for big, hard-to-reach areas like a basement ceiling.
Airless sprayers have always kind of confounded me. I understand it's pressurized and airless, but how does stuff move without the air? Is there an equivalent that is an air sprayer? Yes, there is. They attach to air compressors and blow the paint out, but you can get a lot of splatter. Like airbrushed t-shirts. That's an air paint sprayer. A good example of an airless sprayer is a garden hose. It's pressure-based. The Handy Vocab section is opening up new worlds for the three of us as well.
This topic is going to be great, because if you live somewhere with no basement, it'll be less relevant, but I live in the Midwest, where most houses have basements and a lot of the mechanicals are stored in the basement. Who doesn't want more space in their house? So you're always tempted to finish your basement. I would argue, personally, not from an evidence-based standpoint, that most basements are not fit to be finished. That's my thesis statement going in.
That's a great segue into a little game: Fact or Fiction. Before you spend thirty thousand dollars, which is kind of on the low end, putting up drywall and flooring in your basement, I'm going to say a statement, and you tell me if it's fact or fiction.
Slapping drywall or waterproof paint on raw interior concrete walls stops basement leaks for good. Fiction. Fiction. I think it depends on your type of foundation, but some of them aren't supposed to be sealed over, because the brick or the concrete is supposed to breathe and have that exchange. If it can't, it can lead to things like condensation, or sometimes the paint just peels off. My explanation is simpler: in a battle between water and paint, water wins. If you have hydrostatic pressure pushing water into your house, paint, no matter how good it is or how well it's adhered, is not going to stop that water from making its way in.
Kind of a controversial opinion: the basement systems people put in, the waterproofing ones, just redirect the water, which actually makes sense. The only way to truly waterproof your basement has to be done from the outside of the foundation. So basement waterproofing systems are really water redirection systems. That doesn't make them inappropriate. They do their job. But it's a misnomer, because your basement is not waterproof.
Fiberglass batt insulation stuffed between studs right against concrete is the best way to warm up your basement. Fact or fiction? Just so everybody knows, a batt is basically a long rectangle of insulation, as opposed to a roll. Fiberglass insulation, first of all, yuck. It's horrible to handle. Fiction. It is fiction. Warm, humid air from your own house hits the cold concrete, condenses inside the fiberglass, and you get hidden mold. Do you know what insulation type you should use in your basement? Rigid foam. Ding, ding, ding. And if water is literally coming in, you shouldn't put anything over it, because it keeps it from drying out. So rigid insulation keeps the warm air from reaching the concrete. It's for condensation, not for leaking. And if it does condense, it doesn't soak into the rigid foam in a way that creates mold.
If a room in your basement has a door and a closet, you can legally count it as a bedroom. Fiction. It must have an egress window. I actually just had a client who wanted to renovate her basement and add a bedroom with an egress window and a closet, plus an office, and she thought code wouldn't allow a closet in the office. That's not true. If you're not permitting it as a bedroom, you can add a closet. And people think a room can't count as a bedroom if it doesn't have a closet. That's not true either. Code doesn't care about closets one way or the other. It's more about fire code.
We should also say an egress window isn't just a window large enough to get out of. If your egress window opens into a window well and there's no ladder or steps, you have to be able to get out of the window well and away from the house, too. Some just go into a well that's straight-up corrugated metal.
Last fact or fiction: a clean, painted, semi-finished basement adds huge home value without the thirty-thousand-dollar price tag. I'd say fact, but I take issue with the word huge. Fiction, mostly. Appraisers usually count below-grade space separately from your main living space and give it a lower value per square foot. So for your appraisal, it doesn't really help, but a clean, dry, usable basement helps your home sell. Buyers are more likely to be interested, and they may be willing to pay more even if the appraiser doesn't appraise it higher. Any version of a basement isn't going to add huge value unless it's like a walkout basement with a movie theater. And this is about not finishing it, just making it more usable: cleaning it up, painting the concrete walls, making sure the floor is clean and dry.
So should you finish? If your basement stays dry, has the headroom (a lot of basements don't have code headroom), and you have the budget, you can finish it if you want to. But it has to have those things. You can't just clean up a moldy basement, finish it, and think that fixes the problem. I've been in quite a few finished basements that smell yucky.
I think the best thing you could do to make your basement more appealing is make it as easy to clean as possible. If I'm buying a house, and one has a basement with drywall, baseboard, and paint but cobwebs everywhere and a floor that needs sweeping, and another has nothing, just clean concrete walls and a clean concrete floor, I'm one hundred percent taking the clean one.
I'd add that if you don't have a specific purpose you're trying to accomplish, why finish it? If you want more living space, or another bedroom with an egress window, great. If you're looking for a project and that's your hobby, that's fine. But if you're thinking, I better do this for resale value, you aren't going to get your money back out of it.
So what if we can't finish it? I have four steps to can't-finish-it-but-glow-it-up-a-little. Let's do it.
First tip: we're lighting her up. If you're on a budget, you can do linkable shop lights, which just plug in and string together. We had those at one of our first shops. Light the heck out of the space. I personally don't like bright white light, but if you like surgical-type lights, that's for you. I'd probably do plug-in swag lights with bamboo shades, or a warmer-toned LED. Fun fact: the LED lights from our old shop are currently on the wall in here, because our videographer and editor lit up our podcasting space with them.
Black out the ceiling, or paint it a deeper color. In contrast with your bright lights, it makes the bottom half of the room feel really bright. It can make the room feel a little shorter, so if that's not what you want, paint it a lighter color. A dark ceiling also visually hides all your mechanicals. You've probably been in a number of stores where all the mechanicals are visible but everything's painted black, and you don't even notice. I just saw someone do it with truck bed liner, including all the mechanicals. That feels like a very permanent decision. Can you imagine fixing your electrical or plumbing?
Another tip: go with a light color on your walls so it feels clean and bigger. And if you're doing a bunch of painting, please wear a respirator, because basements don't have as much ventilation. The windows aren't big enough to bring in much fresh air, and it's especially important if you're using a sprayer, because sprayed paint goes every which way.
It's a lot easier to paint a ceiling full of mechanicals if you just tape off the walls and spray it. I would never do it by hand. I saw someone do it with spray cans and thought, that's a labor of love. You can rent a paint sprayer from Home Depot. We used cheap paint sprayers to renovate our first property, and it was not fun at all. We switched to a Graco, which is great, but they're really expensive, so I'd rent one if you're only using it once.
So now we've lightened it up, and we can see the spooky, scary stuff. Next, we're going to fix the floor. If you have some moisture coming through the floor, you can use a clear sealer. It's not solving the moisture problem, but it keeps it out of the new living space you're creating. And if your floor tracks a lot of dust, sealing it is a good way to stop tracking it through your house.
You can seal or paint your floor, but the best way to figure out if it can be painted is to tape a square of clear plastic to the floor, sealed on all sides so it's airtight. If there's a bunch of condensation under it after a day, your paint is going to peel. It doesn't even have to be leaking. Moisture comes up through concrete, because concrete is porous.
If you have problems with water in your basement, I wouldn't put down any flooring that can't be quickly removed. My two recommendations are foam puzzle mats, which come in really cute styles, or an outdoor rug, because if it gets wet, you can take it outside, hose it off, let it dry, and you're back in business.
Now we've made the walls, the ceiling, and the floors cute. What about the moisture that's still there? You're going to get a dehumidifier. Life hack: attach a hose to it and run the hose into your sump pump, so you don't have to empty it and it can run all the time. You also want to keep the air moving, with a fan or even a slow-moving basement fan. It keeps the air from getting stale.
And you don't want a lot of cardboard in your basement, because it just absorbs moisture. It's ideal to swap everything into clear totes, which are also nicer to look at. Two houses ago, our basement flooded all the time, and we realized we couldn't be a family that owns cardboard. Everything goes in a tote, and then there's no heartache. You need to arrange your basement for the basement it is, not the basement you wish it was. Even if it's just damp and doesn't have standing water, cardboard is still going to be a problem. Wait until totes go on sale and buy them over time. We once found eighteen-gallon totes for five bucks apiece and bought about a hundred. We even moved in totes instead of moving boxes. Keep your stuff in totes, and like Arly said, keep your basement easy to clean.
My last tip is to set zones in your basement. Basements are usually utilitarian: Christmas decor, tools, things like that. You can create zones with ceiling-mounted curtain track. I saw someone do it with drop cloths, which was really cool because they don't hold much moisture. I wouldn't put velvet curtains in your basement. They did it around their mechanicals, keeping enough distance for it to be safe, so when the equipment needs service they just open the curtain, and they can hide it the rest of the time.
I also saw someone divide a room in half, with a little TV and a couch on one side and the other half for utility space. Or you can use your storage itself to divide the space. Instead of putting shelves on every wall, put your shelves in one area and make a little living area or workshop with the rest. Get creative. Without building walls, how can you divide the space so it feels more usable? Designated spaces make it feel more finished than if everything's just thrown down there, which is secretly what my basement looks like.
Can I add two tips? First, if you're storing stuff in your basement, add a table. The worst part of going through old stuff is hauling a tote upstairs to find one thing and then getting it all the way back down. The odds of a person like me completing that task are almost zero. But with a table next to the storage, you set the tote on it, take out what you need, and pack it back up. Even if you leave it on the table, it's still in the basement.
Second, if you have furniture in your basement, I wouldn't put in a sofa without legs. Get something with two or three inch legs, so if your basement floods, even if the legs are ruined, the whole couch isn't. We used to live in a place where the basement flooded a lot, and luckily our free couch and chairs had legs. We actually had it happen once with a couch without legs, and you could see the water line on it. There's no way to save it. It's just trash.
So over a few weekends, you can certainly glow up your unfinished basement to be slightly finished and a little more functional. To reiterate the four points: light it up, fix the floor, win the moisture war, and create zones. Then you get a little more living space and avoid the heartache, because we've seen what flooded drywall looks like in a basement, and it's not fun, my friends.
I hope you learned a little bit today. Not from Three Minutes of Chaos. Certainly don't take that to heart. We have our first-ever YouTube series, long-form tutorials, so if it's out, go check it out, and if not, subscribe to our channel so you get notified. You can find us everywhere, but especially on YouTube. We're happy you're here, and we'll see you again soon. Bye!
