Using the square footage on your foundation may be the cheapest usable square footage in your home. Well, what does that mean to you? Simple, if you want to save money, and I mean a lot of it, use your basement square footage as part of your home…not just how you support it. Think about how much it costs to build your basement, whose sole function is to support the rest of the house… and to store your furnace, hot water tank, and all the things you can’t get rid of. Also, think about how big it is. If you are designing a ranch, it should be as big as the rest of your house. In other words, you live (above) on top of another entire house (basement)… but you don’t take full advantage of what it offers you. Why?

I’ll tell you why. He doesn’t feel as comfortable as the rest of the house. Its base is usually cold, dark, humid and smelly. The only people that live down there are spiders, children when they play, or teenagers when they want to rebel and don’t want to live with the rest of the family. They think that makes them independent now, or at least they are until it’s time to eat and do laundry.

It need not be so. By using energy efficient systems like ICF, PWF, concrete stud basements, light gauge steel framing, and more, you can build a basement that feels as good, if not better, than the floors above it…and save money as well. If you’re building a foundation (basement) anyway, why not build it energy efficient and remove part or all of your second story? The additional cost to improve the basement is much less than the savings for an entire floor. I have designed homes where this thought process has reduced the total cost per square foot by up to 50%. That’s not a typo.

One of my favorite examples involved a single woman who was going to be the project manager in her own home. The design was a 1400 sf 2 bedroom ranch on a lake that had a partial walkout basement using PWF construction. In this case, what I mean by that is that the slope didn’t really steep enough for a true walkout, but since I was only building one story, I was able to raise that first story enough to bring it about 8 feet to grade. .. so a complete strike. On the street side, just tilt the slope up to the porch and you’re all set. Now, your cost (this was around 1995) to build the entire house was around $115/sqft. This included everything except finishing the basement. If this is where you stopped, you would have had a 1400 sf, 2 bed, 2 bath house with an unfinished basement.

Now this is where the fun begins. He finished part of his basement, or about 1000 sf (the rest was for the oven, etc…), giving him 2400 sf of usable/living space. When you add the cost of finishing the basement to the cost of the upstairs, the cost per square foot dropped to $70/sqft. This is the best way I know of to make building a home more cost effective…and when you build your home with energy efficiency in mind, you win on all fronts.

So what to do with the money saved? Well, you can enhance other areas of the house…like the kitchen or master bathroom, or add a fireplace or hardwood floors. You can always just not spend it or invest it too. The choices are yours, but now you’ll have choices you wouldn’t have had before. You see, energy efficiency can be very profitable, with the right design decisions.