Carol-very good use of space for different activities. We aren't finishing our basement right away but I am bookmarking his thread for later. Our 'family room' down there is 17x33 I think. Definitely room for multi-purposing. IKEA hack - ugh no. I do not have near the time necessary to plan and carry out that undertaking. :(. We ended up buying 2 cabinets vanity height and depth for $1,000 bucks. The rest we are winging. There have been strong disagreements about the built ins so we will see what we end up with. They will be more basic than my inspiration for sure. At this point I am very thankful for my arches. If that is what I end up with then I am happy. Have you seen Dutty's kitchen IKEA hack? Simply amazing! Your plan looks great! LL is an awesome visualizer. :)

Thanks for all the input so far. Suero - I didn't understand what you were asking about the entrance being in the office, then I looked at the plans again and I totally see where you are coming from. You can't actually tell from the plans, but the entrance is actually at the bottom of the plans - the stairs go down towards the bottom wall, so that at the bottom of the stairs, you see the TV area to your right and the door to the exercise area to your left. The door under the stairs is a closet in the office where my hubby wants to put the router, printer, fax machine, etc. There are only two small windows - one is behind the furnace (go figure) and the other is in part of the basement that is a crawl space (everything above the "top wall" on the plans is only dug out to half-height, so the floor in that area is about waist high if you are standing in the full-height part of the basement. The round thing in the workshop is the water heater - it's actually not there yet (it's under the stairs) but we're moving it to getit out of the middle of our finished area. There's also a central vac along that wall. The big X in the workshop is an area of indented floor with a floor drain -- the PO's of the house used the area to wash their dogs. Also, above that area the ceiling is crazy low -- the upstairs has sort of a sunken foyer so the ceiling there is probably only about 6'6" or so. We have shelves along the left wall that hold all our paint and are using the floor drain to drain the dehumidifier. The workshop area also holds the electrical panel/breaker box. It's really not a suitable area to finish because of the multi-level floor/low ceiling and all the stuff (w/h, central vac, breaker box). Oh, also, the "top wall" in the workshop is an opening to the half-height area that we plan to leave open. This is really hard to explain - perhaps a pic will help (excuse the mess - we've purged a lot of stuff out of the basement since these were taken): To address some of the other concerns you all brought up, I don't expect that hubby will be using loud saws or whatever while someone else is watching TV (for one thing, the tv is primarily for him, LOL!) The workshop is pretty small (the whole darned basement is cramped, to be honest). I mainly just wanted an area where I could do projects - strip a piece of furniture, use the miter saw for a quick cut or two, etc. And somewhere to store my massive collection of paint cans, LOL! Also, as far as finishing the exercise room, the original plan was to have 3 rooms, one being a dedicated exercise room. But when we got down there with our painters tape and marked it out on the floor, the exercise room ended up being so cramped that it felt claustrophobic. And we don't want to finish that whole "unfinished area" because we still have the furnaces and a whole bunch of well stuff (water softener, a few tanks, etc.). So we figured we'd just omit the wall and leave the exercise area as part of a bigger unfinished room. The shelves/desk along the stairs are for my kids - I envision a long countertop with two kneehole openings to serve as "desks" for the kids. I do plan to use the area under the stairs -- part of it will be a closet accessible from the office and the lower part will be accessible from the exercise area for storage of random stuff. And again, the sliding closets along the top are there in part to incorporate the half-height area. Here's a pic to show you what I am dealing with: I want the closets to be about 2 feet deep at the bottom but where the openings to the half-height area are, the shelves will be deeper, going all the way to the back of the columns that support the ceiling there. We should get a lot of toy storage out of this plan, and I want to build the back of one closet such that it will have an access panel to get back to the half-height area (though we'll have an opening in the workshop area, there are some low hanging pipes and beams back there that would make getting something bigger than a box into the other side of the area very hard, so we want a big access panel to get to the other side if we ever need to (our oil tanks are back there, and someday they may need to be replaced.) So because we want to take advantage of the half-height areas and allow for access back there, those closets taking up the whole top wall seem the only way to do it that I can think of. I did enterain the idea of putting the TV built-in into one of the openings, but ruled it out a while ago when my sister pointed out that putting the media stuff along the "top wall" and the toy storage area at the "bottom wall" means that the first thing people see when they walk down the stairs is a whole pile of toy mess. At least flipped so that the TV is along the "bottom" side, the toy mess is tucked up behind the seating area and not the first thing visitors see! Please do keep the opinions coming - you are all giving me a lot to think about and I'd much rather second-guess things now than after it's built!

Pay a designer. You need a Pro. Groundhog Day doesn’t change the correct answer.

We just finished the layout stage of our basement renovation. Our basement is almost exact the same size as yours so I'm very interested in seeing your progress! We chewed on plans and ideas for more than a year. We only came up with a layout we both feel good with once we finally figured out what we really want to use the basement for and what should be possible in the future. Our house is one bedroom short for our family so we really need a bedroom or sleeping area in the basement. Our house only has one bathroom (one toilet) for 5 people so we need an extra bathroom too. We have an exit to the garden in the basement so we wanted to have some kind of mudroom, laundry and mechanical room needed to stay downstairs too. First we thought of making a bedroom for or oldest son. But the square footage we have to work with is not big and making a bedroom, bathroom, mudroom and mechanical room would divide the space in a lot of little rooms and a hallway which takes in space as well. Furthermore, in this area basements are typically used for recreational functions. So we fear the resale value of our house might decrease with no obvious recreational space down there. We decided to turn the basement into an open concept bedroom/office for ourselves and have the bathroom for ourselves too. This way the basement will be our own little studio, the kids will each have a bedroom and one bathroom upstairs. When the time comes that our kids move out, we can simply take our bed out of the basement and replace it with a couch or two to turn it into a recreation room. I hope this can help in some way! Maybe you too can combine the functions of the rooms you want, like: bathroom/laundry or recreation room/guestroom ? This is roughly the new layout of our basement, the dimensions of stairs and doors are a bit off but you'll get the idea :)