Doing up your basement might just be one of the best interior design trends of the last few years. For most people in the UK, if you’re lucky enough to have a basement, you’re probably using it as an unfinished storage space and don’t actually treat it as a part of the house. It’s ok, especially in those older houses that weren’t made to be as spacious as we need them today. However, your basement still has some potential, regardless of its state. If you wish to change your house around, here are 5 ideas for your basement that can seriously increase the value of your property.
Working from home? Give yourself a home office
This idea stems from more and more people giving a shot at working remotely, rather than going to the office every day. It’s useful, especially when you have young kids that you want to stay at home with or if you’re not feeling like talking to people that day. Some find that working remotely keeps them more productive as there’s less social distractions around them. However, working from home can be difficult, requires a lot of self-discipline and above all, pushes you to create a comfortable home office. You have to have a desk, an ergonomic chair and a place you can get some quiet work time. Putting a home office in your basement might just be the perfect idea for the space.
A fancy wine cellar
On the complete opposite site of turning your basement into a home office, you could use it for a fancy wine bar to hold all your wine bottles in a perfect environment before they’re open. Basements are usually colder and darker than the rest of the house, which turns out to be ideal conditions for wine bottle storage and since you’re probably using your basement for storage anyways, renovating it a little, adding specialised wine racks and making it look good as well as being functional could be a good way to go.
More kitchen space
A kitchen is the heart of the house and sometimes you just don’t want your pretty, expensive equipment to get ruined by your culinary experiments. You could turn your basement into a secondary kitchen and with proper ventilation turn it into a space where you cook all the smelly foods, saving the kitchen upstairs for when the guests come around or you want a quick and simple breakfast. It’s also a good idea when your main kitchen is quite small, there’s not enough countertop space and you need more surface to work with.
A spare bedroom
With London houses, your bedroom count is quite limited, usually to two or three depending on how you use the space. This is why so many people decide to switch houses a lot once their families grow bigger and they need more space. Our idea is much more simple – go down to your basement, freshen it up, put some paint on the walls, put cosy floors and heating system and there you go, a bedroom ready to be lived in. You can use it as a spare bedroom for your guests or a cool bedroom/hideaway/playroom for you kids.
A gym in your basement
If you find yourself always wanting to go to the gym, but never find time to actually do so, building one in your basement might just be the perfect solution. It doesn’t have to be filled with all the expensive equipment you would find in a professional gym – stick to what you actually use and like, like an exercise bike, exercise mats, weights, rowing machine etc. Once you put some mirrors on the wall and a safe flooring, you can start investing in equipment step by step, making the gym bigger as you go.