I decided to finish the whole basement. Going to add a home theatre in the 24x14 room, which is basically half the basement. The other half will be a home office, half bathroom, and a short landing/hallway off the stairs.

This should add about 620 finished sq feet to the house. I'll also be walling of the furnance, panel box, and H2O tank area and installing a closet door for under-stair storage.

I went to home despot today and picked up some dricore floor for the subfloor. Not cheap at $7 for a 2x2 tile, around 6x more expensive than a typical OSB floor, but I have heard good things about this stuff from friends, so decided to go with it. dricore floors

Some before pics:

Home Theatre room (from the door & right) with play area left of the door:


Future site of 2pc bathroom:



Furnance, sump, H2O tank, and service panel will be walled off & acoutic batten added:



Under-stair closet:



Need to box this in. The ceiling is 8'9", so there is plenty of room to cover this without losing headroom.

 

Have fun!

 

whoever did the wiring, did a clean ass job

 

 

that was my first thought as well

i don't think i've ever seen such tidy electrical.

surprising, i've always heard Canada's electrical codes are pretty lenient. guy must have alot of pride in his trade.

 

Those are old pics, yes? Cuz, if I'm not mistaken, Edmonton should be covered in snow right now.

 

I envy you.. I am planning on helping my Dad build a theater for their new home. We're basically finishing off a room in the unfinished part of their basement like you are. Good luck!

 

can we get some close-ups of your breaker box? i need some :wackit: material...

 

i busted ass laughing after that.....good one!!!

 

I'm in amazement how nice that looks.

 

Im sure you have a vast collection of HOME IMPROVEMENT magazines underneath your bed as well


By the way the basement looks good!!! Cant wait to see some finished pics

 

 

Still trying to justify going with a dri-cor subfloor (or any subfloor for that matter).

Never ever had a moisture problem
My neighbors carpeted directly over the concrete (with 8lb padding) and the floor is a very comfortable temperature.

 

Looks great. Your basement incompleted look better than half the basements we saw when house shopping.

 

and that shit looks hella clean!

Good luck on the project!

 

Thats what i did as well. Never cold, never any moisture problems

 

And I wonder if it's required by code to do a box like that in Canada?? I've been wiring panel boxes down here for 5 years now and have never ever seen a box wired like that.

Kind of freaked me out at first...I thought I'd seen it all

 

LOL, yeah, I thought the box was well done too. It may be partly due to this being a show home for the builder. Generally, the sub trades do not seem to take much pride in their work out here, this is particularly evident in the newer homes built during the past year's boom (house prices went up 30% here, which has resulted in some pretty shoddy work).

The panel box has lots of space for the basement circuits, I reckon I will run 4 circuits with one dedicated to the HT.

The smaller tan boxes are the old landline phones; I switched to a digital phone which is the black modem at the bottom right.

The co-ax cable is running through an amplifier - I suspect the original owner did this because with him being the only house on the street, the cable signal was probably quite weak. A year later, the cable company would have increased the juice going along the line, but this, coupled with the amp, made the signal too powerful for my PC modem. To dowgrade it, I am running it through 2 splitters; one at the bottom left, the other at the wall plate in my PC room. PC Modem works great now - I get 250Kb d/l through bittorrent

OK, on to the money shot:

 

Took the pics last month - what a difference! Though the early snow might be a good thing - I want the ground to be frozen so I can bring the sheetrock in the back door without having to trudge through the mud!

 

WTF is that? ROMEX?


btw... Nice box.

 

The dri-core was a matter of expedience over cost - it should only take 1-2 nights to install, tops.

I've done laminate over concrete too without any moisture problems. In this case, the rationale for a sub floor was for warmth and the flexibility to install a carpet. Though right now I am leaning towards laminate tiles for the office and bathroom, and cork for the HT.

 

 

Do you mean the orange wire? Sometimes the romex is colour coded, in this case it denotes a 10g wire for the 220V Dryer circuit. The electric oven is also on a 220V, but the plastic sheathing is still white.

 

Every wire (coming out of the panel)... Looks like ROMEX.

 

I think that is code for here - for between-wall wiring, you have to have a non-metallic sheath. What kind of wiring is used in the USA?

 

so?

 

same shit, romex.

although scribs local codes could be different.

 

that IS one beautiful box

 

god, what i would do to simply have my phone/cable/electrical/security all in one spot

I've got my phone/cable crap in one corner of my basement, my electrical in another, and my alarm units dead center of the fucking room... arghhh.

 

Definitely the weirdest way I've ever seen a box wired -- Not saying it's wrong or anything, I've just never seen it done like that so I'm not used to it. Are they all wired like that in Canada?

And I'm surprised more of your wire's aren't color-coded. As you can see in the pic below, all of our 14 gauge wire is white, 12 is yellow, 10 is orange, 8 and 6 (6 not pictured) are black, etc. But, different places different rules I guess.


This is what every box I wire looks like:






The two wires hanging down by the panel in the first pick are cable and they get moved later on. And sorry, I know the pic quality is horrible but it's from an old camera phone that I had last year, but you can still get the idea.


If it's not to big of a deal, can we get a shot of the panel without the front cover? I'd like to see what it looks like on the inside

 

Scrib, is all your wiring running to the box in conduit?? I know you have to use a lot of conduit...just curious what the rules are around the panel.



How 'bout everybody post a pic of their panel so we can all critique.

 

You would puke if you saw my box.

 

That's a clean install as well... but not nearly as obsessive compulsive cool

Yeah, I'm surprised all Ginges wires are white. Although, I'd definately prefer it that way in the case of an unfinished basement.

Fuck yellow romex is fugly.

 

I'm guessing these wires were all pulled before you owned the house? And is there any reason they weren't pulled to the same area...or are they just where whoever installed it wanted them?

 

Thanks, I try to make them as nice as possible. And I'm not allowed to get as creative as I'd like, I just wire 'em how my boss taught me

And you'd be surprised how many homeowners ask us if they can have all white wiring


Your house is older, correct? Built in the 50's or 60's maybe? (just guessing from what few pics I've seen of it)

I've never been impressed with anyone's wiring back then. Of course rules were different then, but I just see a lot hack marks in wires, wires all tangled, etc.

But then again, I guess I can't expect too much out of 40-50 year old wiring

 

My house is nearly 90 years old.

Lots of old BX. It's a mess.

Couple that with the 2-3 minor renovations/additions the house has seen and received... ugh... scary scary site.

I could try to clean it up, but I think I'd rather just build a new house in the Spring

 

Nothing wrong with it...

 

Everything is the house is in conduit. Once in the box, it obviously goes down to 12 & 14 AWG copper straight to the breaker.

 

Decided to skip the underlayment altogether. Both of my neighbors used the 8lb felt under the carpet and the floor is not cold.

Can't justify an extra $750 for a basement. (120 tiles @ $6 a piece)

 

The only color code that I know of that is required here in Canada is that we must use red jacketed wire to indicate 2-wire 220 heater wires. This way you dont mistake a white wire for a neutral. Color coding is starting to come into vogue for some installers even though it isnt code yet.

Nice box Ginge...