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I’m contemplating “finishing” the basement of my AirBnB. It’s a whole house STR with 4 bedrooms, kitchen, formal dining room, living room, foyer, and small sunroom. The basement is unfinished—block walls painted white, concrete floor, ceiling that shows the floor joists on the first floor. The laundry and mechanicals are currently in the basement and would remain there.
I’m thinking of finishing the basement to add a powder room, an owner’s storage room we could lock, and a small media room. This basement could not be finished to provide sleeping space without extensive renovation required by code to give a second egress from the basement. Besides which, I don’t want another bedroom. The house already accommodates more guests (10) than I would really prefer to have so I already limit the number of guests and I’m NOT trying to max out the guest count. I’d simply like to make the house more appealing to more potential guests.
Do any of you have finished basements in your Airbnb? Do you find them useful? If any of you have media rooms in your Airbnb, I’d love to see your pictures! Or if any of you have finished rooms in your basement, I’d love to see pictures of them.
If any of you have suggestions on other uses for a finished basement space I’m open to them!
The majority of my guests are in their 30s to 60s and either traveling for work or visiting the area for family reasons. There are already set ups (desk, office chair, desk lamp) in each bedroom for working from home so I don’t need more office space. I do get families with children but I discourage people with children from crawling age up to school-age. The house isn’t really suited to mobile children under the age of six or so. It isn’t that I won’t accept those bookings; it’s simply that I vet them to make sure the parents understand the kind of place they are renting and what my expectations are.
I’m interested in what y’all think would be a value add to the Airbnb that would be most appreciated by potential guests, especially ones who fall into my current guest profiles.
You say it would be a small media room. Is there a reason why your current living room could not have a media function? If you’re concerned about the look of a TV in a living room, have you seen Samsung’s FRAME TV? Google it. I just wonder if your current setup could give you the media functionality you want and then enable you to add NEW functionality in the basement.
I wonder whether an exercise area, yoga studio, gym setup would add more value? A massage table! You could add a TV there, and speakers for music. So you could be adding a number of amenities beyond ‘gym.’
I am assuming that you’d have one of those drop ceilings that hide the mechanicals but provide easy access. I’d consider tile floors just because many basements are subject to a flood risk – maybe not yours. Otherwise, wood or wood-like. Hydronic (hot water) radiant floor heating is really nice. Look into companies like Warmboard.
You mention a powder room. I don’t know how many bathrooms you have, and whether at least one has a tub. An extra full bath is always welcome, especially if the area is an exercise area. You could have a jetted tub, a steam room by enclosing the tub/shower in glass. Mr. Steam.
Outside the powder room, consider a sauna. You can get a fancy one, which is beautiful and costs thousands. What we did is buy a one-person portable one for a few hundred dollars and have a handyman custom build that portable one into a wood frame. Just a thought. But this is for ourselves.
Whether your guests use the gym/sauna/steam, people enjoy the fact that they ‘could,’ they ‘might’, ‘maybe next time.’ Please don’t discount the value of that; the gym industry is built on it!
I don’t have a finished basement in my Airbnb but many of our competitors have added sunrooms. We’re costal so can’t have basements.
The Airbnbs with the sunrooms do get booked a lot and on their reviews guests mentioned that they appreciated the extra space. Many of them have ping pong tables or pool tables in addition to a TV and seating.
I think that a finished basement would not only attract more bookings but will also improve your property value. Unfortunately, it will also raise your property taxes.
You can get a home equity loan for your project and write off the interest on your taxes.
The living room has a large screen TV. It’s not ideal for a home theatre/media room because it’s open to the foyer and formal dining room and it’s very bright with huge windows and tons of light coming from the foyer and dining room also. But currently there’s only one TV in the house and that’s where it’s located.
When I say a “small” media room…I haven’t measured it but the space is probably 20 by 15 feet. I’ve seen some huge home theatre rooms. This isn’t that big…but it’s not tiny.
The small sunroom on the second floor is set up as a small exercise room/yoga room/meditation room already. It hardly ever gets used. So I don’t think a home gym would see much use based on my usual guests. Plus, a home gym would incur more liability. Kids might mess around with the equipment, or adults might injure themselves and try to hold us liable. Not so much chance of getting injured watching a movie,
Ahhh. Good points all. Though for the reasons I mentioned I think it’s VERY nice that you already have that small exercise room/yoga room/meditation room, regardless of use.
One other thing – and I don’t know all the pros/cons.
We have a projection system. The pro is that you have a HUGE screen. I’m told though that while projectors are getting better that TV technology is improving faster and so a TV would likely have better color, detail. It might be interesting if people here comment on that.
It would also be nice to have a surround sound system, like in some movie theaters where, for example, the sound from the left rear speaker is different than from the right front, that kind of thing.
The thing I like about a media room is that it doesn’t bring any additional liability like some other applications. If you do this, consider what channels you have available for streaming and if the internet supports them.
Finished basement doubles as a bomb/tornado shelter. I’d definitely do it. LOL.
To be slightly more serious, I think a media room is a good idea for a dark space like that. I also think that it will have appeal as a sleeping space. Cool, quiet, dark with it’s own toilet? So be prepared for that especially when you host large groups.
For me the decision process would be all about the money!
–Would you be able to charge more per night after this renovation?
–Are you missing out on bookings because you do not have this space? Have guests complained or expressed the desire for a separate media room?
–Is your house the only one on the block without a partially finished basement? If so, renovation while you still have tax advantages because of STR might be a smart move for resale later.
–Has the storage closet become a necessity for your housekeepers?
–Are you prepared and capable of managing the space so that extra people don’t end up in sleeping bags down there? As a former professional landlord, I can assure you the biggest problem landlords face is extra people. (That and unauthorized pets.) At a minimum you might need a front door camera.
Yes, this is a worry. International building code calls for below grade sleeping areas to have two egress points. This basement has only one. The current windows don’t qualify as an egress because of their size and height from the floor. So I (a) could not advertise it as sleeping space, and (b) don’t want people using it as such.
Fortunately, I have ring cameras at the outside doors, greet guests in person, and live right next door. I don’t often have people showing up with extra people and I take care of it (nicely and professionally) when it happens.
As you say you do get families with kids, though you discourage pre- school ages, how about a kids’ playroom? Outfit with kid’s books, games, puzzles, and toys. Maybe some bean bag chairs and a colorful rug. You could probably find most of it second-hand, either in shops or Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, etc.
I know my kids would have been amused for hours at a time to find a bunch of “new” stuff to play with. And the parents would probably love to find they had some adult time because the kids were happily engrossed in “their” special room.
I wasn’t actually thinking of “extra people” at all. But if you have 8-10 people it wouldn’t be surprising to me to find that someone in the booked party ends up sleeping down there. It could be a fight between members of a couple, someone who is sick or a snorer and doesn’t want to disturb their partner, someone who prefers more quiet than they are getting upstairs, someone who couldn’t sleep and wanders down to watch TV and ends up falling asleep down there, and more.
It may not happen often but you won’t be able to control whether it happens.
And when they do, what are you going to do about it? What would your House Rules say?
You need to check your local fire & building codes to see what’s allowed in that space before you do anything. This is really important from a safety standpoint, and it’s possible that your insurer may not approve it, or that if something disastrous happened you would not be covered.
I would hesitate to have ANY guest activity in a basement area that does not have an exit door to the outside, even if it’s a rarely used covered stairway.
Yes, I’ve been doing more reading. It turns out any below grade “living space” must have a second egress. Right now, we are fine because a laundry room, bathroom, or storage room doesn’t count as living space. But bedrooms, home theatres, home office, game room, den, and so forth, do count as living space. So we would have to add an egress to finish it as a media room.
Yes, but not many. The vast majority with children have older children. I do have toys for the pre-school/kindergarten age children. I set up the foyer area as a playroom when I get littles. The foyer is probably 10 feet by 12 feet and it’s on the first floor, so the parents find it easier to keep an eye on them. I don’t know but I think the parents would prefer to have them where they could check on them more easily.
A dedicated playroom would be used by maybe 6-10 kids a year. A media room would be used by every one, I think, especially if we got a Disney Plus subscription.
I was going on the premise that you said you discourage young ones, preschool age, so was envisioning a space for 6-11 year olds, i.e. don’t require constant vigilance.
But if you don’t get that many families and a media room would get more use, then of course that makes more sense.
