Beautiful Home

So often, basements are dark and dank places, ill-suited for any sort of niceties of life. One way to change that is by installing some decent lighting. Now, electrical building codes will vary from one municipality to another, so these ideas are strictly an overall outline of how to do it.

First, ask yourself if you’re qualified to do electrical work. If not, hire an electrician; people get hurt and even killed fiddling with high voltage power lines! Once you’ve made that determination, check on the size of your home’s electrical service. If you have an older home, you may not have a lot of amperage to play with; you don’t want to overload your fuse box. If necessary, you may need to upgrade your service to accommodate the new fixtures.

Next, locate all of the available electrical lines running through or near your basement. Ideally, you want to tie into what’s known as the “homerun”, the main line running through your house from the fuse box. The reason for this is that the line is capable of carrying the heaviest power load.

Once you locate the lines you want to tie into, determine which circuit they’re connected to. Many professional electricians work on power lines without turning off the circuit – do not try this if you’re not a professional!

From your building department, you can learn which type – which gauge – of electrical wire to use. The last thing you want to do is install the wrong wiring and have to replace it later. Another key point to consider is this: grounding. If you have an older home, your outlets may have only two prongs, which means they are not grounded, and the wiring may not have a ground line. But, most modern appliances have three prongs. This means either using adapters, or replacing all of your outlets with new ones. In some cases, some building codes require you to also replace the old wiring, and this can significantly boost the cost of the work. If you’re lucky, you can just go with the grounded outlets, which are available in any hardware store, and are easy to install.

In terms of lighting, you’ll need to consider your ceiling. Very often, basements do not have well finished ceilings – as they are essentially the floor of the ground floor – and you may be dealing with rough beams and joists. So, you may have to finish the ceiling. A hanging ceiling is an inexpensive means of doing so, and thus allows you to put in recessed lighting. This can be key because if your basement has a low ceiling, any sort of hanging light fixtures could get bonked by any tall members of the family. Also, a switch for the main light at each door of the basement is best. That way, no matter which way people come in and out, they can turn the light on and off. 

Tags: basement electrical work, basement

Many homes have basements; some are mere storage spaces, and others are finished and used for real living space. In the case of Florida, a lot of homes have no basements. The reason is simple: the water table is far too high. Homes along the Florida coastline are typically built on land with a water table literally within a foot of the ground’s surface! This makes a below the ground basement nearly impossible.

So, how do you build a basement in such a situation?

If you want to go below ground, you must install what’s known as well-points. These are small pumps – to look at them, you’d think they were giant hypodermic needles – and you place them every few feet in a line around the area you want to drain. By setting the bottom of the well-points down several feet, you can pull the water table down low enough to build a basement. Now, this system does have its limitations. Given the high water table, you have to keep these well-points running all the time! This can run into some money. Plus, if there’s ever a power failure, you can end up with water starting to seep into your basement.

Another means of having a Florida basement is to essentially put it above ground; this is very popular with coastal homes. As Florida is – unfortunately – prone to hurricanes, the state has strict rules regarding homes built on the coast. The finished floor elevation of what they call the living space has to be above the storm surge elevation. The area below that is considered non-living space – the basement.

As the area can possibly be inundated during a storm, the building code is very strict about what can and can’t be put there, and how the homes must be built. First, pilings are used to support the main homes, and then the basement walls are what are known as breakaway. This means that – in the event of a storm, with water surging in from the sea – the walls will break off and float away, leaving the pilings in tack. This also means that the basement can not be bedrooms, as the area is considered dangerous and expendable. So, people can use the basement for storage, a garage, and then what is known as non-essential areas: workshop, sewing room, playroom, and so on. People can get very creative in how they describe these rooms!

So, while Florida may not have the standard sort of basements, they do have them, and you can make use of them for some really neat living space.

Tags: florida basement