When you have a new home built you usually don’t get the basement developed with the base price. The builder may quote you a price to professionally finnish the basement, but that will usually be at least fifty thousand dollars. It is the best way to go since they will make the basement look like the rest of the house. The most important part will be that the drywalling will be done by someone that knows what they are doing. There is nothing worse than going into a basement where the home owner did the drywall as a weekend project. Usually they do a bad job and if they designed a poor layout as well, then the basement is worse than being undeveloped because everything needs to be ripped out and started from scratch.

However, if you do decide to develop your basement on your own, you really need to plan it out properly. You may be good at framing so go ahead and do that, but what about the plumbing? If you are worried about your basement filling with water some day, then you can outsouce that to a qualified plumber, but they are really expensive. One thing that almost anyone can do is the wiring of the electrical outlets and light fixtures. This is not rocket science but you need to be extremely careful because you can get yourself killed if you touch a live circuit. Here is a short video that explains how to install some outlets.

There are many more videos on youtube that explain switches and light fixtures.   If you don’t feel comfortable doing drywall then consider outsourcing that part to a professional. Depending on how much of the work you do yourself, you can save a considerable amount of money. You also have the pride of knowing you did a nice job and get that feeling of accomplishment.

The main takeaway here, is that you need to take your time and plan everything meticulously. If you don’t, you could actually harm the value of your home, because no one else will ever want to buy your house if you created rooms in the basement that are not functional.You can not go wrong with at least one bedroom and a bathroom in your basement. Almost everyone will want that.