Add Your Individual Style
This basement is yours so all of your basement design ideas should reflect your personal style. Not all trends work for everybody, so it’s best to just use them as inspiration rather than copy them completely. Better Homes and Gardens suggests personalizing the items in your basement, such as repeating a pattern throughout the room by adding it yourself to pillows and window treatments. Choose a color and add squares of paint along the hanging edge of a curtain, and then add painted squares of the same color to pillows.

Continue a color scheme throughout the entire basement for a cohesive feel. Better Homes and Gardens recommends taking mismatched items like vases or plates and painting them, or adding metallic accents to them using a paint pen. If you like to take photographs, frame a few and place them around your basement to make it more personal. Do you have a favorite hobby or interest? Express it in your basement by giving the room a theme. Your basement design ideas can have a sports theme, tropical theme, or even a retro theme. Onlinetips.org says that if your basement is especially gloomy, be sure to use bright colors in your accessories to liven it up.

Don’t Break the Bank
Basement remodeling designs don’t have to cost a fortune, especially if you do most of the work yourself. Better Homes and Gardens suggests burlap because at less than $2 a yard, it offers an affordable way to add texture to a window treatment. You could even paint designs or stencils onto it. Use old t-shirts or scrap fabric and make your own pillows to add a personal touch to basement seating areas.

The DIY Network offers a number of useful and affordable basement design ideas. Try sprucing up old furniture by painting it or using fabrics. Upholster an old sofa with new fabric. For a futon, take an old fitted bed sheet and cover the cushion with it. A throw casually tossed over furniture easily provides an inviting and relaxing feel to a room, and a pile of floor pillows offers cheap extra seating. Also, hang a fabric collage on a blank wall for instant, affordable art. DIY even suggests purchasing different-sized pieces of canvas stretched over a wooden frame and tightly stapling fabrics that match your room’s color scheme to them, attaching the longer sides first, then the shorter sides. For a fun, creative touch in a sports-themed basement, DIY proposes making a table by gluing hockey sticks together.

Plan Ahead
Make sure that all of your basement design ideas are planned out before you get started. Better Homes and Gardens recommends planning different activity zones throughout your basement and figuring out what each section of the room’s function is. Leave plenty of room for storage as well, whether you add wall cabinets or even add walls to a corner to make a closet. If you’ve decided to make your basement into a home office, make sure you plan the room accordingly by figuring out how much room you’ll need and having any electrical work taken care of by professionals.

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