Home Renovation Tip - Utilizing The Underground Potential Of Basements

Many home owners decide not to have their basements finished when they build their new home. It's not inexpensive to finish a basement, and new homes usually take about a year for the home's foundation to settle. If there are cracks in the foundation or leaks in the basement, this is something you need to discover before you decide to strip an already finished basement. This is a situation that would only serve to add additional costs and sleepless nights!

If you decide to renovate your unfinished basement, the first step is hiring a contractor to visit your home and examine the basement for structural security. Once this is done, it's time to draw up plans for the renovation. The final transformation is entirely up to you, based upon what you want and what you can afford. There are many companies that specialize in basement renovations. Changing that dingy, bug-infested concrete slab into a fully functional room is quite an undertaking; the first step is deciding exactly what your plans are for the space, and are those plans "do-able."

Are you planning to use the basement for entertainment? Do you wish to add a full bathroom that you can afford? Would you like a children's playroom? How about another bedroom, a home office or a "media" room? Perhaps you simply need a lot more storage space.

Design and planning are the most important steps in the renovation process. You can tackle planning your renovation yourself, but it's best to bring in the professionals to help evaluate and overcome challenges such as limited headroom, a lack of natural lighting, insulation, and structural support columns. Contractors will also give you an estimate on your project, as well as a concept layout. Once you have the layout, you may want the contractor to finish the job, but sometimes, you have enough information to then tackle the project yourself.

To transform your dingy, unfinished basement into a lovely and valuable addition to your home takes time and money. Design a room that won't destroy your budget and flatters the remainder of your home. If you decide, at some future point, to sell your home, a finished basement will add value to the property. Your basement can become a lovely and much-used area of your home.

Author Steven Gaines takes us from New York's most expensive condominiums and co-ops to the offices of its most powerful real estate brokers to reveal the outlandish displays of ego, bad behavior, and status hunger that come into play when the best addresses in the city are on the line.

With his signature elan, Gaines weaves a gossipy tapestry of brokers, buyers, co-op boards, and eccentric landlords and tells of the apartment hunting and renovating adventures of many celebrities - from Tommy Hilfiger to Donna Karan, from Jerry Seinfeld to Steven Spielberg, from Barbra Streisand to Madonna.

Here, too, is a fascinating chronicle of the changes in Manhattan's residential skyline, from the slums of the nineteenth century to the advent of the luxury building. Gaines describes how living in boxes stacked on boxes came to be seen as the ultimate in status, and how the co-operative apartment, originally conceived as a form of housing for the poor, came to be used as a legal means of blackballing undesirable neighbors.

A social history told through brick and mortar, The Sky's the Limit is the ultimate look inside one of the most exclusive and expensive enclaves in the world, and at the lengths to which people will go to get in.

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