Oakdale Basement Project: The Design Concept

I have been working behind the scenes on a personal project: our basement. We have lived in our home for about 8 years now and have decided to finally give in to finishing our basement out. Like many others, this wasn't the house we intended to live in long-term but the interest rates had other plans, so we find ourselves maxing out every inch of our current home. I thought it would be fun and helpful to take you along the process and show you how I approach all design projects for my clients. I have found that designing for myself is much harder than designing for my clients. Alas, let's dig into the design concept and mood board.

Our goal is to maximize this space by including built-in cabinetry. Our house has very little closets, and essentially no storage space. To address that we have put a significant focus of our dollars into custom cabinetry. We will have a stand-alone furniture piece for kids stuff, a storage banquette bench for all of our games, a wet bar with cabinetry, and built-in bookshelves/ cabinets.

I start every project with inspiration which often includes a pinterest board. To view my board for our basement project, click here. Then after all my inspiration images are gatherd, I like to create a virtual mood board and physical mood board (see above). What is driving this design is the floral painting found on ebay and my favorite paint color that I have been dying to use for awhile- Benjamin Moore's Golden Retreiver. From there I pulled some of my favorite fabric samples and created a scheme.

Secondly, I started to draft the walls to create a space plan for the footprint of our basement. I knew we wanted a TV/ lounge room or "snug" as it is called in the UK. We needed a room that could serve as a home office and then evolve into a bedroom, a bathroom, and an area for a wet bar. See the floorplan above. I wanted the basement to feel open yet have distinct areas. One of the issues I needed to tackle was creating a natural transition from the tile to the carpet. We needed tile in the wetbar area which also is the room that has the only outside entrance into the basement. I definitely did not want to deal with cleaning dirty carpet on a regular basis. To create that transition I created a wide cased opening.

Lastly I created soffit plans and cabinetry plans to address our storage needs as seen above. In my next blog post i'll be sharing the details of the soffit placement, cabinetry, and the lighting plan. Thank you for following along!