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.