Fuel Ghoul: Green Basement Renovations, Advanced Flooring and Insulation for Walls

Fuel Ghoul helps homeowners who are old friends finish their renovations, and install energy efficient appliances and advanced windows and doors before the start of the summer when their families are home making memories.

Professional speculators and building contractors who flip houses for a living must follow four basic rules,

1) They should try to make their client's space bigger by using newage building materials that are lighter, stronger and less bulky. Trimming an inch or two off the width of the walls can have a profound effect on the available space inside the home.

2) Professional contractors should endeavour to make the space brighter, by installing glass block in the exterior walls ( as seen below) or adding thermal windows into walls, or adding new sunrooms and skylights.

3) The experts should work to make the whole house more energy efficient by installing energy star appliances, and using new age building materials to capture heat loss. Best practices include designing thermal barriers and installing heat pumps. The latest trend is to put solar panels on the roof to collect the sunshine - free energy? It's not too late to get your solar rooftop subsidized by the Ontario Microfit program and the City ofToronto is where Hydro One most needs the power.

And finally,

4) The contractors should work to make the living space safer, and more efficient by redesigning utilitarian areas and removing walls and other barriers to movement, sight and sounds (unless sound barriers are required). The family room is gone, and now the whole first floor of the house is open and therein lives the modern family.

Smojoe describes how Kevin Dugald uses insulted wall panels and basement flooring to make over his basement into a showpiece of thermal efficiency and shag carpet comfort with a fireplace and big screen television opposite a huge long (sectional) leather couch and four easy chairs, two at each end.

Below is Kevin Dugald remaking the ground floor of his townhouse in Toronto. The stairway in the sidewall to Kevin’s basement - the walls are composed of Amdry insulated wall panels and you can see me selecting the best examples at the Rona at Islington and 401 in Toronto. Its an investment property and he's doing a green flip, despite advice given in a recent magainze article, Green Flips Bring Only Red InK Kevin hopes future home buyers will appreciate the work he's put into remodeling the structure with green equipment and building materials.

first floor lkitchen and basement renovations

There are a bunch of ways to make money transforming a thin, narrow Toronto townhouse into beautifully streamlined ship of convenience the whole family can enjoy.

RULES OF THUMB one of the best ways to add value to the renovation is to brighten interiors and reclaim lost space by employing new age building materials.

Kevin’s property in the Riverdale area of Toronto had already been ‘flipped’ a few different times by the time he bought it in 2010. The first floor had extensive renovations in the nineteen-eighties which completely remade its interior and did work to the exterior. Most Notably, the contractor had stuck some glass block in the exterior walls, in the kitchen area, to brighten up the counter tops. Say what you will about glass block, the idea is rather brilliant and does indeed define the room.

The glass block was added thirty years ago but still works to illuminate counter tops and food preparation areas with beautiful healthy daylight.

Kevin didn’t remove any interior walls.

Home Renovation Magazine Canada claims that removing the walls between the kitchen and living room remains the number one home renovation trend in the new millennium real estate contracting. I’m surprised that there are still any walls left to remove! Home renovations experts and interior designers have been drafting open concept living environments for almost sixty years now. Engineers are well paid to approve plans to remove structural walls and combine the kitchen and dining room into an open concept living space.

Kitchen islands become work platforms, cook stations and dish washing areas where the family meets, eats and finds entertainment.

basement renovations - start by lowering the floor and pouring a new conrete pad, then work up adding insulated walls and floors.

Kevin elected to use Amdry basement flooring which is screwed down directly into the slab which has to be pre drilled to accomodate the screws. Each 24″ x 48″ Amdry panels each provide a full 8 sq. ft. surface coverage. Amdry is a one-step insulated subfloor system with a moisture resistant protective surface film. It provides a healthy, comfortable, warm basement by significantly reducing slab surface moisture and temperature fluctuations that may lead to mold and mildew problems.

You can see more of the guys working and purchasingand then subsequently reselling basement flooring and insulated wall panels on Toronto Golf Nuts, and selling their surplus basement flooring and insulated wall panels on Red Flag Deals and a similar thread offering about insulated wall panels and basement flooring on Toronto Forums as the team liquidates the surplus for Kevin who characteristically overestimated and bought too much after being given a great price for a large order.