Behind the Scenes of Our Latest Basement Renovation Project in Fort Saskatchewan
Hey guys, thanks for joining us on our YouTube channel here at Project G. We’re going to take you on a tour and show you what’s up in Fort Sask on our newest basement development. Awesome. Right from the top, I guess I ask you: what do you think are some of the first steps when you are considering doing a basement renovation or basement development?
Well, yeah, for sure. One of the very first steps is: what is the purpose of your project? What are you going to use the space for? That’s going to be very useful for us in helping determine the project basis. So, some options would be to just get some additional living space, and that’s, that’s what’s going on here, right, Tom?
Yeah. This one’s going to be some extra room for the family to use as the boys grow, the homeowner wants some more extra bedrooms down here and a bathroom for the boys; and it’s going to be a nice space for them to grow up down here and enjoy.
Yeah, for sure. What other common uses do we find for basements when people are using that extra space for what reasons? Well, a lot of the time, if customers don’t have kids, then could be spare bedrooms and guest rooms and stuff like that, or home gym. And then, of course, you got the legal basement suites which are kind of on the rise, especially in Alberta and whatnot. And in Canada in general, there is a bit of a home crisis. So, that extra suite is a pretty good, pretty good investment in your house that they call it a mortgage helper and whatnot. It just can make you a lot of money to have some basement renters, and if it’s done properly, you won’t even really notice that there is basement renters with the soundproofing and separate entrance and stuff. Mhm. So, that’s one of the nicer options.
Yeah, definitely is going to increase the value of your home as well. And so that’s always a bonus rather than just having a dumping ground for all your stuff. Have a nice finished space.
Yeah. And a lot of builders these days have secondary entrances. They come with the house now, too, because builders are starting to plan for the future. We just did a basement development in Fort Sask, and having that side entrance is really nice. We didn’t do a suite in this one, but just for the contractors and our workers coming in and out with material makes it such a game changer rather than trying to trudge through the living room with drywall boards and dodge the cat and the fish tank and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Planning Your Fort Saskatchewan Basement Development
Okay, let’s do a little walk through here. Tom, tell us about this project. Where are we at?
Okay, so this is going to be one of the hardest spots to finish here. This is the stairs to the basement. Yeah. And yeah, it’s not a lot of square footage, but with all the different framing that we’re going to have to coat in drywall, it’s a pretty complex situation for installing drywall, boarding, all that stuff. It’s really time intensive here to get this done properly. And not to mention doing the stairs. That’s a lot of work with the winder staircase, trying to get your flooring on there and build out all the stair nosings. So, this is one of the hardest spots of the whole basement. And it’s not a, not a time area that people are going to spend a lot of time in, but nevertheless, it’s a big time commitment to get this spot finished. We’ll have our carpenters and drywallers mud this up and make it look beautiful.
So, a couple other considerations while we’re here. We got rim joists. We’re going to have to make sure that our insulation’s all done up well here because that’s one of the main areas with heat loss that you can have on your rim joist. There’s absolutely no insulation there at all. It’s time stamped. It says do not insulate there. So, oh, interesting. Maybe there’s a water line in the backside or something. This is the garage as well. Okay. Shouldn’t be too cold on that side. Gotcha. Okay. But we see it all the time. We come in to do a basement and either the wrong spray foam’s used and it’s got to be cut out, or just a bad job of poly and not having a proper poly and proper vapor barrier there is a big problem.
We’ve seen entire exteriors of houses rotten out because of that. Yeah. Just went in for a simple sanding job and the next thing you know, we’re changing all the exterior sheeting because of a bad poly job. And in the 2000s, the city was doing their own inspections and stuff like that. And I think that some, some work that wasn’t quite to par got passed, and we’re starting to see some of that on the tail end—some of the bad poly and the rot that’s coming from it. But otherwise, it looks pretty decent.
Essential Insulation and Vapor Barrier Standards
We’re going to fix up the hockey puck damage from the boys and whatnot. Make sure that it’s fully sealed. If you pan down here, what you can see is there’s a couple layers of poly. So, this poly here bullet—this layer will act as a barrier between the concrete, which is porous, and the non-pressure treated base putty. Okay. So, your options when you finish a basement is you either have a pressure treated base plate or you wrap it in poly, which they’ve done here. Okay. So, that should be good like that. This will pass inspection. We will just go ahead and add some acoustic sealant to the bottom. Okay. Or else the air could still travel through here, obviously. Okay.
But that’s a big one for us. Panel on our legal basement suite, we ended up pulling all the base plates and putting poly down to, to meet code requirements, which ends up being a lot of work. In other jobs, sometimes we’ll just—if we’re doing it from scratch—we’ll often just use pressure treated base plates. And that’s what we’re going to go ahead and do on the interior walls because that is code requirement to make sure that you either have the pressure treated base plate or the poly barrier. See down here, they actually don’t have it. We’ll probably send up having to slip some poly here just to be safe. Or no, there is under… yeah, there is some poly there. Probably under that one. Yep. So, that’s good. Even this one right here. Yeah. Right here. Okay. Okay. So, that’s good to go. Don’t want to get your basement done and then end up having to pull base plates up. So, that’s a big one.
What’s a couple different ways we can finish our room joist? With that rim joist, you know, you can of course do the spray foam. Spray foam the whole thing is probably about the easiest way to do it. Usually, it’s not spray foam when the new homes are done. They’ll often just be the pink fiberglass insulation, the acoustic cocking, and the vapor barrier. But typically these days, we’re doing the spray foam, right, Tom?
Yeah, spray foam. And on this one, since there’s not a lot of utilities going through, we’re just going to use the poly. It just gets difficult when you have a lot of penetrations going through your exterior that it’s pretty hard to wrap your poly around there if you have ducting and whatnot, but this one’s pretty straightforward. So, we’ll just be able to cut some squares of poly and acoustic and tape it around the ring and stop that cold air transfer. In this one, we’re also going to have a drop ceiling. So, it’s a nice affordable way. And that still allows you to have access down the road to all your water lines. If you ever, ever have any issues, it’s fairly easy to change out, right? Change out a drop ceiling panel rather than redo a drywall mud, tape, paint, mud, tape, paint, texturing. So, it’s a common and popular choice for ceilings, right?
Yeah. Before we get out of this area, I’ll touch on this access panel here. So, what this is would be the main sewer cleanout. Okay. So, there’s a few options we can do with this, but typically we’re just, we’re just flooring over that. Yeah. Because it’s a high traffic area and whatnot and just want it to look nice. If ever the basement floods, then the flooring is going to be coming out and they will have access to it at that point. So, like we said, we’re going to fix up the poly. We always treat our customers’ home like our own. We don’t, we don’t go over top of anything that’s a little haphazard. We want to make sure that it’s done right. The city actually doesn’t inspect the poly. All they do is a building final inspection for the basements under 50 grand. So, I know a lot of contractors might just go over this and say it’s good enough, but we’re going to make sure and tune it up properly.
So, we talked about step one: you’re going to decide kind of what the customer wants, or if you’re a homeowner doing the project yourself, you’re going to really think long and hard what you want for the space. From there, you’re going to have to make your prints. So, they don’t have to be that fancy. You could hand sketch them on a piece of paper or you could get an architect to build them for you. But one way or another, you’re going to need to get some prints before—before an existing print and the proposed print—and you will send that to the city and pay the permitting costs and from there they’ll give you the stamp of approval if everything looks good. Okay, sounds good.
Layout Design and Egress Window Requirements
So for this basement, what’s the layout going to be like? On this basement, we’re going to work with some of the natural elements that are here. For example, this beam. We’re going to have our wall come straight down. That way, it kind of hides the beam and eliminates a bit of a bulkhead here. Okay. So, this will be… So, spinning around here, we’re going to have our shower stall here. Okay. And it’s going to be 5 foot wide washroom. And then we will have the toilet. That’s what this 3-in pipe is. It’ll be a toilet. And then straight over here will be the vanity. So, this will be a small bathroom, but it’ll be very functional.
Okay. Then on the inside of this beam here, this will be a closet for the bedroom. So, big closet just inside that window. And this will be the bedroom. So being that this will be converted and and inspected, we’re going to change this window out because it, being that it’s a slider, definitely does not meet egress. Okay. So, we tried to just get a quote for the top hinge window. That’s the ones that just swing in. Pretty common in basements, but that didn’t mean essor installed. And basically, a window is a window door, hence the name. So, what it does is it’ll have hinges on the one of the sides here. I believe we’re going to have it on the right side. And it’ll have a handle and the entire frame of the window will pull open. Okay. And that’ll allow for the egress opening, a nice big opening for anyone to climb out in case of an emergency or maybe kids need to sneak out in the night.
And then we’ll change out that window well also because it’s not code compliant. It’s too narrow. The rule nowadays is 20 24 in depth from the face of the window to the edge of the window well there. I see. So, we’ll be a little bit shy of that and sure it’s good. So, we’re going to have a little bit better energy here. You can see right through the outside there. Yeah, there’s… well, there’s some sprightful. Is there a little sprightful? There’s some sprinkle here. Oh, I see. I see. This will be the bedroom as we said. Okay. Size bedroom. The closet will run here just on the other side of the window and it’ll go right to the back wall. So, it’s a pretty good size bedroom. And then straight in the middle, we’ll have our wreck area, living room, and the back side there will be the storage and utility area. So, we don’t typically finish in there. So, it’ll make that section nice and easy. Be pretty small basement actually, but very functional.
As you can see, we already got our studs here. Well, pressure treated in the back and we’re going to get framing here this week after the framing’s completed. Next up will be the electricians and the plumbers. So, starting from the ground up, we can talk a little bit more about the floor. So, since it’s a newer home, it has a pretty flat slab, which works in our favor. We’re not going to have to spend $1,000 on floor level like we did at our legal basement suite. It’s a pretty big job over there. When the floors are uneven, you can’t really just go over top of it, especially with a floating floor. It needs to be pretty, pretty flat. So, here we’re going to do vinyl flooring throughout. And yeah, like I said, the floor’s pretty flat. No big humps in it. So, that’s going to work in our favor.
Some of the other options: so you could do carpet down here. You can also do subfloor. We don’t do a lot of it, but yeah, you can get a subfloor with some insulation value on there. Keep it a little bit warmer. Or if you really want, you could do in floor heating in there as well. In the utility room, we’ll just keep it the concrete and allow any water to go down into that floor drain over there. The walls, we’re going to do drywall—drywall walls and mud, tape, paint. And then moving up to the ceiling, we’re going to do a drop ceiling here. We’ll have to do a couple electrical and HVAC modifications first. Install a bathroom fan and whatnot. Some options though: we could do safe and sound insulation up there and res channel.
Yeah. What’s the differences? We talk about pros and cons between a drywall textured or flat ceiling versus a drop ceiling. What’s, you know, what’s cheaper? Why would you use one over the other? Those type of things. At the end of the day, it’s really personal preference. Some people want to just drywall ceiling flat or some people prefer texture, but in this case, we’re going to do a drop ceiling because it can be one of the most affordable options. And per say, by chance, if a hockey puck hits it and goes through the panel… Mhm. At least the homeowner could replace a panel on their own. It’s not having to go through the process of mud and tape and painting. A little easier to fix, right? Yeah. It can be very easy to fix, especially when you got plumbing lines and that kind of thing, right?
But like I said, it’s all personal preference. On the last basement we did, we did a really super nice drop ceiling. It was all MDF and prepainted. Yeah. So, that worked out nice. How about pricing that between the two? I think it’s a common question—like what’s cheapest? It’s just like anything really. It depends what you want. If you want a double 5/8 drywall and a textured ceiling, that could be pretty expensive. But just a flat 1/2 in ceiling could be on the lower end. And just like drop ceiling, there’s very basic options. And then there’s a, like I mentioned earlier, the last ceiling we did was an MDF ceiling and it was quite fancy. So, that ended up costing a lot. So, just really depends on your preference and your budget and there’s always an option. Yeah. Yeah. Even within the ceiling types, right? Like you got drop ceiling look—what are the basic mid and higher range u cost and quality ranges are there in the drop ceiling?
Yeah. We’ll just… you got your basic 2×4 ceiling with the standard like steel grid be the cheapest price. And then moving along, there’s some fancier ones with the 2 by two panels and NDF pre-painted paneling. Yeah. Which is really nice, but they’re not cheap either. Over $10,000 for the last basement ceiling we did. Yeah. Was that the 2 by 2 on that one or there was some other types as well? There’s some kind of super fancy systems or it looks like a board and batten type look. Yeah, that’d be the painted MDF is what we did. Painted MDF. Yeah, that’d be the upper end. Yeah, there’s all different types of vinyl, wood, and then just your basic types. So, really just depends on your preference and your budget. Yeah. Very good.
Electrical Safety and Professional vs. DIY Renovations
So some other considerations. We’ll get all the electrical done here once the framing’s u finished up. Mhm. So, the most common lighting we do in our basements is the LED pot lights. Yeah. They’re just cost effective and they’re super bright and if they last for a long time. Mhm. So, that’s the most common lighting we do down here. Well, obviously we’ll have a basement vanity light. Mhm. And some TV plugs is pretty standard. We’ll put it in the wreck area. Get that code compliant. This is a federal panel which is a little bit rare for the age of the home. It’s a newer home, 2000s. So, this is a federal panel. What’s the significance of that?
So, being that it’s a Federal Pioneer panel, yeah, these panels are less likely to trip when a short occurs. Okay. Seen videos and talked to electricians and you can damn near weld with the panel and it won’t trip. So, okay, could be quite a hazard for you and your family if you do have a federal panel. Okay, because um god forbid a wire on a Christmas tree shorts out, it’s very unlikely it will trip. It’ll just keep on welding away until potentially a fire starts. So, we always inform our customers if they do have a federal panel. And on this particular job, we did give them an option to swap the panel out. I think they’re still weighing it over a little bit, but knock on wood, they haven’t any problem so far with it.
So, yeah, I guess it’s still compliant. It’s grandfathered in type thing, or… Yeah, it is still code compliant, but it does make it a little more tricky for us to do the basement suite. We’re going to have to AFC protect the circuits down here. Okay. So, it does add a cost. I see. And the FC circuits are prone to tripping very easily. We had a job where, again, it was a federal panel and we had just a battery charger plugged in and it was actually tripping. G because of this AFC. So, how do you know if you’ve got enough room in your panel? Like, you know, I think a lot of folks that’ll just look and say, “Well, here’s my stuff and I’ve got all these spaces.” Does that necessarily mean I’ve got extra circuits?
No, for sure not. You’d have to talk to um your electrician and they take the panel cover off and they tell you what, what you have for room. So, the easiest way to see what kind of amperage you have would be looking at the main breaker. You can see here it’s 100 amp. So, that’s pretty, pretty typical for this year of home. Okay. But my 1950s house came with a 60 amp service. So, they had been upgraded to 100. But yeah, nowadays 100 amp doesn’t go that far. If you get an electric car charger in the garage and whatnot, you’re going to run out of juice pretty quick. Yeah. So, a lot of new homes come with 200 amps these days.
Okay, it smells good. What else have you got in this area? So, right below me here is the sump pump, which is nice to have. My home didn’t come with a sump pump because it was 1950s, but um yeah, they’re great to have when you get a lot of rain. Keeps your foundation nice and dry. Okay. So, that’s an important one. Over here we got our instant hot water system, which is a nice touch. I have one in my home, too, and I love it. You have unlimited hot water. They’re nice and small, too, and compact, right? Like compared… a water tank would have taken up this entire space. Here we have just a teeny little box on the wall, and that’ll do the hot water for the entire home. Over here, she’s got the central valve. Over here, you can see the intake for the furnace, fresh air intake. Over here we have our main um PEX manifold. So, they just looped this line to itself. So, we’ll be able to cut into this and use that for the… this will be the hot side. So, we’ll be able to send one of these to the shower. And this is the cold side. So, we’ll be able to tee some of these off or do another branch and send some PEX over to the washroom.
Building Basement Suites in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta
Okay. So talking again about the purpose of the space—like often as you mentioned, basement suites are quite desirable. Would this basement work for a basement suite? Why, why or why not?
So, this one does not work as a basement suite because there’s no separate entrance. But anything is possible with enough time and money, as they say, like you could cut in an egress door, but that would be pretty significant costs for sure. But as is, with the entrance leading through the living area of the main floor, would not work. I see. Yeah. And but anything’s possible with enough money. We could get a door cut in on the side and then you could have a kitchen in here and you could make it work. Well, for sure. Yeah.
What other important factors again for the basement suites like off top of your head some of the main items that you are going to be required?
Okay. So, starting from the floor up again, we would need a backflow prevention. You need to separate the plumbing from the um suite downstairs to the main floor. So, we’d have to backflow protect all the plumbing. Okay. That’s a big one and it can be pretty expensive, but now is the time to do that if you’re going to consider it. Okay. So, we got that was the main consideration for the floor. Well, we would also have to separate all the heats. We need a separate heat source. Mhm. And you would either have to do electric baseboard heaters down here or you’d have to install a secondary furnace which would be kind of tight on space. It’s not a huge basement, so might be the best bet to do the electric baseboard heater.
Okay. Some other considerations: you would need soundproofing in the ceiling as well as resilient channel, and you would also need to do drywall—an entire layer of drywall in the entire mechanical room and have it fire taped. Okay. You’d also need some solid core door to separate the suites. Yeah. And self-closing door on the utility room and interconnected smoke alarms which will be required down here regardless of suite or not. Okay, so these ones look like they already are. Yeah, you can see that they have the wiring is coming right to it. So, okay, if the smoke alarm goes off, it’ll set them all off in the house. Okay, that’s a bonus. Yeah. So, there’s lots of considerations with a legal basement suite and it’ll easily double the price of your basement. Yeah.
So, we could talk a little bit now about the pros and cons to doing a basement development yourself. It’ll be done effectively and at a faster speed, too, unless you are retired, then you’re not going to have the same amount of time as we would. Yeah. So, efficiency: we’re going to get in and get it done versus trying to get it done on weekends and evenings and those type of things. To speak to some of the cons: of not having all those connections for plumbers and and electricians and and stuff can be quite, quite a task to find that. I know when I did my own basement suite, even sometimes trying to find people—reputable contractors—can be quite challenging. You need to vet every individual sub, right? If you’re going to do it yourself, and so that can be a challenge.
Yeah, it could be a full-time job trying to find the right guys to do that. You become… unless you are someone who can take care of most of that yourself, but those are a pretty rare breed of person that can complete all the electrical, the drywall, the plumbing. You really have to be a jack of all trades, which there’s not many of those. Not too many. There’s quite a few hacks out there, even people who call themselves professionals and, you know, they got laid off maybe from their regular job, their regular 9 to 5, and thought they’re pretty handy and are going to take a crack at contracting. And we see a lot of that, right, where we have to come in and fix something someone else has done.
Fort Sask Reno for All Your Home Renovation Needs
Some other cons to doing it yourself is if you don’t have the experience to lay out the basement, you might have run into some roadblocks when it comes to the permitting and the design. We have an architect on staff, so works out well for us. We can work with the customer and make the space very usable based on what’s already the natural beams and stuff that’s already in the basement, where someone else they might struggle a lot trying to figure out the layout. Having Fort Sask Reno pull the permit for you is a little easier because the city knows us well and they’re a lot more likely to pass our inspections. They know that we do quality work and there’s no questions there. But for a homeowner pulling a permit, they’re going to really look and make sure that you did do all the things. And if you are a homeowner, you’re less likely to catch all those little details.
And by chance, you forget the poly underneath your base plates… Well, you might be ripping up all your base plates. We had that on a job in Fort Saskatchewan when customer had all the poly done and we were supposed to come in and just board, but in the send, we ended up having to pull their insulation and their poly and pull all the base plates. So, it added a lot of expense to the job. Yeah. So, it sounds like yeah there’s an opportunity to save money if you do it yourself. But then it’s also a huge potential that you could lose money more than what you would even pay a contractor for if you try it yourself and then you mess it all up.
Well, then someone’s got to come and undo all everything you’ve done and fix all that and start from scratch. So, you can be behind the Eightball for sure. Yeah, for sure. And it’s a big job. Like each one of these basements takes over 300 man hours, excluding subs, to get done. So, that’s a lot of time for one guy to do themselves. So, that’s 300 experienced carpenter man hours, huh? Right. Yeah. Not the first kick at the can homeowner people, right? No, I’m not… we’re not saying it’s impossible, but there’s definitely some risks you take on.
Yeah. If you got the time and experience and you enjoy learning new stuff, then by all means, if you’re not afraid to take a risk, take a chance, then yeah, do it yourself. Yeah. So, overall, I think we caught most of the details down here. Stay tuned to the channel and we’ll make a video when this one’s wrapped up. This basement’s going to come in around the $55,000 mark—kind of as a basic basement, but with all the permitting and the bedrooms and bathrooms, there’s quite a bit going on. So, okay, that’ll be the benchmark here. Perfect. And that’s about all we can say for now until the guys start coming framing and we’ll keep on this. Awesome. Nice job, Tom. Thanks for a very informative video and we’ll, I’m sure, be making videos as we move through this project and more to come. So, thanks for joining us and like and subscribe. Awesome. Thanks, Tom.