After much deliberation we did eventually decide on a design for our basement renovation. It’s the easiest design option in as much as we don’t have to change any of the existing walls and all we have to do is add three walls and box in the ceiling. It should also meet all of what we feel we want out of the basement renovation.

The three walls are the short stubby wall just inside the door, the wall with the door leading into the storage / furnace room and then the short 45 degree wall at the end. The 45 degree wall leaves us with a near perfect nook to put a wardrobe or cabinet for storage.

Where we plan to put shelves, photos and bookcases we’ll be putting blocking behind the dry wall. That’ll save having to use those annoying drywall plugs that never seem to be as secure as I would like.

We will also be adding as much soundproofing as possible to the walls and ceiling of the room as the sound environment in the room is very important for the recording of the YWAM Podcast, and other future recording projects. I’ll write more about that later, but we think we’ve come up with a pretty good solution.

I know that it’s strange for a web-site dedicated to Renovating, but we would rather not have to renovate at the moment with us expecting our third child. We’ve been looking at different options for preparing out house for child number three,  but with a pregnant wife and a tired husband we would love to find a solution other than renovating our house, again …

One that thing that we have discussed a lot is for our kids to share a room. We have an eight-year old boy, a four year old girl and number three (gender to be determined) on the way. If can figure out a way for the kids to share, then we could avoid, or at least put off, renovating our third house in a row.

Setting Up A Room for Siblings to Share

For us to set-up a room for our kids to share would at least require us purchase some new furniture, and decorate the room in a way that would suit both kids.

The first thing we would probably want to consider, given the limited floor space in the bedrooms, is a bunk bed…

Your basic bunk bed is a great use of space that basically lets two beds fit where one bed would normally fit. Some of the nicer bunk beds actually separate to make two separate bed, but your basic bunk, like the Ikea Mydal Bunk Bend above, is a single frame. At a cost of only $139.00 CAD though it’s a very tempting product.

Some of your fancier bunk beds can include everything from a desk, a dresser and a book case in it. A good example of this is the Ponderosa Student Loft Bunk Bed from The Brick Canada. At a cost of $1,199.97 + tax it’s a fair bit more than the Ikea Mydal option, but it includes the desk, bookcase and a dresser.

Another option that pursued when we were in Townsville was to build a loft bed.

The loft bed wasn’t as high as a bunk bed, but it still allowed us to use the storage space under it to put a book shelf and a toy box. The kids also liked to use it as a cubby hole by draping their blankets over the edge to cover the front of it.

There is a whole story behind the loft bed that I need to write about someday, but it eventually involved us lowering the bunk to the normal height of a bed after a couple of “incidents”…

Can  our opposite sex children Even share a room?

The main hurdle that we have come up against in considering if our children can share a room is the law. This is something that we certainly were not expecting to be an issue!

In Calgary, Alberta, Canada it is illegal for a child over the age of eight to share a bed-room with a sibling of the opposite sex.

Well, there goes the plan of our eight year son sharing a room with his four year old sister. Besides the fact that one is a morning person and the other a night owl, this certainly throws a spanner in the works …

Should A Baby Share A Bedroom With An Older Sibling?

Since we know that our four year old girl and eight year old boy are not legally allowed to share a room, should we let one of them share a room with the new baby?

I guess when considering this we need to consider our two children. Our daughter is a very light sleeper, and I think sharing with a baby would be very detrimental to her sleep and and therefore health. Our son is very heavy sleeper, but also needs a lot of alone time, which would be hard if he were to share a room.

So I guess that leaves us with the option of the baby sharing a room with us, or renovating the house. Either option will be hard on our sleep as we’ve found before…

I’m so confused …

So we have been trying to work out some different options to prepare our house for child number 3. We have a three bedroom plus office house (I work from home and need the office) and are trying to work out how to best set it up for three kids. There is a large storage / furnace room in the basement that could be separated into two separate rooms, but we are sure how to best use those rooms.

The biggest problem is that of the two external sides of that room one is under a deck and the other is where the gas line comes into the house.

I called the local gas company, ATCO, a few weeks ago and was told that we need 39” between the gas meter and a window, but that we could put a window under the gas line once it came into the house. This week I called again to check it and was told that a window needed to be 36” away from the gas meter and that it could not be under the gas line!

So two different stories from the same office about putting a window near where the gas comes into the house:

1. 39” away from the meter but the gas line can go over a window
2. 36” away from the meter but the gas line can not go over a window

So which do I believe? Based on the first option I thought I had actually come up with a solution to make the storage / furnace room into a new bedroom, but that’s not possible if the second option is true!

In the idea above the place I thought we could in a window is the big block on the left, with the gas meter the block on the right and the gas line is the green line. This would work if the first person I talked to was correct, but not if the second person I talk to was correct.

I’m so confused …

Have you ever noticed that almost everything in life is geared for a family with only two kids?

• Place settings come in groups of four
• The normal sedan will only fit two car seats or booster seats 
• Many table and outdoor settings come with four chairs
• Glasses often come in groups of four
• Your average home only has three bedrooms

I could go on, but suffice it to say that now that we are expecting our third child we are finding that many things in life are setup for families with only two kids.

The house that we are in now actually has a non-conforming bedroom in the basement (window is too small to be conforming). I work from home though, so that bedroom is currently being used as an office / recording studio. So we need to create a new conforming bedroom, or modify the existing bedroom and build a new office.

To be honest we are a bit stumped with how to prepare / renovate the house to accommodate another bedroom and have still have an office, storage room, play room, etc. We are also hesitant to begin renovations after all that we did on the last house and with a baby on the way. During our last pregnancy with our daughter we were out of the house while it was being raised less than a month before she was born. That is not the type of situation that we want to repeat.

Here is the current floor plan for our basement:

The current office is huge for a bedroom for an 8-year old. It’s bigger than our master bedroom! To make it into a conforming bedroom would require us to replace the existing window with one at least double the size, which would mean cutting into the foundations to install the new window.

Putting the bedroom in the existing mechanical / furnace / storage room makes a lot of sense. The problem though is that the existing window is under the deck, which you can’t make conforming unless you remove the deck, so we can’t simply enlarge that window. The gas line comes in the middle of the other external wall, which can’t be within 39” of a window, so we can’t put a window in that wall. So without removing the deck, or moving the gas line, we can’t put a large enough window in that room to make it a conforming bedroom, but it would work as an office.

I wrote about two options that we were looking at when I found out how big the door has to be to our furnace room. If we were to go with one of those options that would leave our son with a massive bedroom, and us with a smaller office.

Our primary needs are:

• Ample Storage
• Office large enough for Two People
• Bedroom for our 8-year old son
• Laundry Room
• Family / Play Room
• Inexpensive option

We will most likely be making the windows in the office larger and making that a bedroom, and then building an office into the other room. I’ve been really taken aback by the quotes by builders so far. We have been quoted over $15,000+ by three different renovation companies, so I’m a bit stumped what to do.

Any suggestions?

I’m visiting a mate at the moment who wants to turn the huge shed on their property into the “Ultimate Man Cave”…

The shed is 45’ x 20’ high with  13’ ceilings (13.5 metres x 6 metres with 4 metre ceilings). In addition that that area there is also an annex at the back that is used for storage and will continue to be used as such.

They’ve had a good start with picking up gear for the man cave. So far they have acquired:

• Large Rear Projection TV
• Comfortable Couch
• Ping Pong Table
• Air Hockey Table
• Sportcraft 3-Point Throwdown Basketball Game

They’ve also got a line on a dart board and possibly a pool table. Of course I reckon no man cave is complete without proper man cave signs, which will probably need to be custom made (I reckon a man cave neon sign is a bit excessive, I prefer the wooden variety).

It’s a huge area to work with and really quite a dream space to work with. The walls are partially covered with plaster board / drywall. There is also ample power points in the shop and cable television has been run into the shop. The future man cave is within range of the wireless network from the house, although it might benefit from a wireless signal extender (like the Hawking HWREN1 Hi-Gain Wireless-300N Range Extender) mounted on the wall closest to the house. In one corner it looks like there has been some plumbing roughed in for a small bathroom / toilet.

We’ve been inspired with man cave ideas by sites like:

• PerfectManCave (www.perfectmancave.com) which has some great ideas
• The Art of Manliness which has a good article of 14 Famous Man Rooms (http://artofmanliness.com/2010/07/27/famous-man-caves/) I especially like Mark Twain’s Billiards Room

But we feel like we at a bit of an impasse with what to do in setting up such a large area as the ultimate man cave. So we wanted to as you …

If this was yours, what would you do to make this space into the ultimate man cave?

At the moment we have a rather large storage / mechanical / furnace room in the basement of our house here in Calgary, Canada. The room has our furnace, hot water tank, freezer and a lot of shelves in it. It is easily large enough to be changed to a storage / furnace room and another room that could be used as an office or study (the window is too small for a bedroom).

One of the concerns about that room is the width of the door. A door to a mechanical / furnace room need to be large enough to fit the hot water tank and furnace out of it without any problems. Currently the door is 30”, or 76cm wide, which is technically too small to meet code for a furnace room. The door should be 32”, or 82cm wide to allow proper access.

To further complicate matters, if we were to put the door to the mechanical / furnace room in the newly created office space both the door to the office AND the door to the utility room would need to be the full 32” / 82cm wide since the hot water tank and furnace would need to go through both rooms.

It’s kind of funny / annoying that moving in here we were told and thought that to add another room in that area would be easy, but we are very quickly realising that nothing is every as easy as it looks.

In some recent inspections of building sites around Townsville the inspectors issued three fines to people doing work without the proper licence. This is a reduction from the last time that they did the inspections of licences when they fined a lot more people for improper licensing.

All three of the people fined for not having the appropriate licence were all working on the same owner builder’s building site.

The owner builder himself did not have an owner builder’s license. An owner builder license is required for any work where the total material and labour cost would exceed $15,000 if done by professionals. The owner builder course is a relatively short course that I had to do before starting the work on our house.

There were two other carpenters working on the same house that were also fined for not having the appropriate license for the work they were doing.

To avoid getting fined for improper licensing of tradespeople you should make sure to do the following:

• Check the license of any and all contractors that you hire
• Always check if you need a license before starting any building, renovation of home improvement projects. Even a seemingly small project like putting in a shed requires council approval in some parts of Australia (including Townsville)

If you are unsure about any of the licensing, and if your contractor does have the proper license it would be worth giving a call to the local building authority. Here in Queensland you can check out any licensed trades person on the BSA web-site as long as you have their license number.

While they were cutting out the floor and building the new staircase we taped up some black plastic tarps to block off the construction zone openings from the rest of the house. When they had to demolish our old concrete bathroom floor the entire house got covered in concrete dust. This time we didn’t want to take any chances, so we put the black plastic sheets up a few days in advance (last time they were a day early, so I didn’t get to put the sheets up).

Taping up the black plastic worked well and kept most of the dust out. I would recommend it to most people if you need to keep living in the house, and / or if you want to keep the rest of the house clean.

The biggest problem that we had is that the bathroom is on the other side of the black plastic. This made for some rather uncomfortable mornings, and a lot of trips out for lunch so that we could use the bathroom at the mall or the restaurant.

In the evenings we would peal back the tape and plastic a bit so that we could squeeze through for the bathroom. Not ideal, but it worked …

The amalgamation of Townsville and Thuringowa has led to delays in approval for various building projects around the city. Even with simple projects, right now it can take months for approval to of the plans to occur.

This delay was one of the reasons we chose not to replace our entire driveway. I reckon that it could also be slowing down other, small projects around the city.

Given the current wait time on finding trades people in Townsville it probably impacting larger building and renovation projects too much.

The people most affected by these approval delays are probably the owner builders and home handymen working on their own, small projects.

After writing my article about if I should get a yearly termite inspection I have been reading more about termite protection on our house. One of the things that I have read about a bit are “Termite Bonds“.

A termite bond is very similar to a termite warranty that we have with our termite treatment. It is provided by the company that treats the house for termites and protects the home owner from future termite infestations.

There are generally two different types of Termite Bonds: a retreatment bond and a repair bond.

1. Retreatment Termite Bond:
   The retreatment termite bond requires the company to retreat the house and property if a termite infestation is discovered in the treated areas.
2. Repair Termite Bond:
   The repair termite bond not only requires retreatment of the site if termite infestation is found, but also requires the company to repair any damage caused by the termite infestation. The amount of repair covered will depend on what is written up in the original bond. Some bonds also require high deductibles on any repairs that are required, or any materials needed during the repair of the termite damage.

Like the warranty on our termite treatment, many termite bonds require annual inspections, and some may even require a top up of the treatment used. It is very tempting at those times to skip the inspection and let the bond expire (as we debated when our annual termite inspection came around), but if your house came with a bond, it is probably best to keep up with it.

Here in Australia the average repair bill for a house with termite damage is about $7000. Given that most termite bond inspections only cost about $200, it is well worth it if you live in an area that has termite infestation problems (like most of Australia from what I understand).