I Like An Unfinished Basement

April 28, 2025

I like an unfinished basement. I think it’s great to be able to see so much of the mechanical side of your house. If, or more likely when, there is a problem, it’s so much easier to identify and fix it without having to take down finished walls, ceilings or floors.

Before vs After

Even though I prefer an unfinished basement, I still like it to be a step up from Scary Basement. The basement in this house isn’t a Scary Basement. It has a concrete floor but it was poured in sections. Some of it is smooth, some is pretty rough and there are lots of deep spots or holes. It had been painted at one time but most of that had flaked off and turned to dust. Sadly, it didn’t occur to me to paint the floor in the basement before I moved in. Instead, I moved in all of my stuff, put up some shelves and then delegated a fair bit of stuff to live down there. After about a year, I got tired of going downstairs to do laundry or retrieve some of that stuff without some protective footwear. For me, that’s taking a step towards Scary Basement so I set out to paint it. That meant doing it in three sections and moving all of my stuff out of one section at a time while keeping a path to the stairs open at all times. The Before compared to the After isn’t that dramatic visually but I can tell you my bare feet are saying otherwise.

The photo above is from the other side of the basement. It’s my laundry area. And while it’s still not Scary Basement, I know I can do better. My house is also without a utility sink. I’m finding it harder and harder to use my kitchen sink for everything. A utility sink will be a great addition for my sanity.

There’s no staging happening here. My shame is on full display. You can just see the freezer peeking out from behind that pile of junk. Believe it or not, I was still accessing the freezer with all of that in the way.

The plan is to have the sink to the left of the washer/dryer. That meant relocating my totes to this spot where the freezer is and then moving the freezer to the left of the radiator. The new setup is sooooo much better.

Everything is tidy! It’s so easy to access. It’s clean. The junk is gone. It’s so much nicer to look at than the heap I had here before. Why do I find it so hard to tidy up? It makes my life infinitely better when I do.

And then I took it one step further. I hung up a tarp around the totes. You can’t see it in the photo but just out of the shot to the right is where I have my mitre saw set up and it likes to kick dust straight into that area. The tarps will help to keep the mess off of the totes and out in the open where I can clean it up.

Next up: the utility sink.