How to Turn Your Basement into a Sports Room Everyone Will Love

The basement is perhaps the least attractive area in the house for any activity and that is why most homeowners use it for storage purposes.

However, there are so many things that you can convert the basement into if you let your imagination run wild.

Contrary to popular belief, a man cave is not the only thing that the basement can be converted to, as a gym studio for the ladies is a viable option as well.

In fact, the options are endless but sports are the leitmotif because there is no other room inside the house suitable for indoor exercise.

Waterproofing the basement

One of the greatest enemies of sport below ground level is moisture. Whether it’s a leaking pipe or a high level of air humidity, the first thing you want to do is to dry out the basement.

This can be achieved by painting the walls using waterproof paint. It will hermetically seal any cracks so no water can get inside.

If there are any holes larger in diameter, then you need to seal them off tightly before applying waterproof paint over them.

This way, water will be kept away from the basement and you won’t run the risk of flooding or your machines getting destroyed by moisture looming in the air.

Get the air flowing

If you ever went to a gym located below ground, you perhaps found it difficult to breathe even when you were not exercising.

Things get even tougher once you start lifting weights as our body needs plenty of oxygen during exercise. The air inside the basement is stuffy because there is no natural flow of air since the whole room is underground.

This means that ventilation should be among the first systems you install. Pumping in fresh air from outside should be your priority; without it, a sports room in the basement is impossible to create! There should also be ducts helping stuffy air leave the room so there is a constant breeze inside the basement.

Choosing the right sport

Needless to say, gymnastics, fitness, aerobics, and weight lifting are the most common sports found in underground home sports rooms. However, you can think outside the box, pun intended, and try to introduce other sorts of activities.

A pool table or a chessboard can be equally as fun as a pecks machine, as they will work out your grey matter. Furthermore, if you are passionate about golf, you can practice your swing inside the basement, believe it or not.

With the help of a wall mounted trainer made by Swing Eagle you will soon start swinging like Tiger Woods. And if you ever do turn pro, what a beginnings story that would make!

Getting power down to the basement

The aforementioned golf swing can be perfected using a trainer and video that you have to be able to watch inside the basement. This means that you need power outlets down below.

The existing ones usually get damaged by moisture after a couple of years and for some unknown reason, they are always made to be as ugly as possible. Before painting the walls, you can remove the old outlets and replace them with new ones that will better fit into the new décor of the sports room.

As an alternative, you can always drill a hole through the floor of your house to make a passage for cables that will enter the basement from above. This way, you can place a plasma TV in from of the treadmill, so you are well-entertained while jogging.

The ceiling

Since you are going to have cables coming down from the ceiling, you need to take special care of this surface. Because the basement is engineered differently from other rooms inside the house, there is likely to be water, sewer or gas pipes out there as well.

They are highly sensitive and one clear hit could sever them in half, wreaking havoc in the sports rooms and endangering the lives of everyone inside. That is why they need to be tightly secured and bolted to the ceiling, as a well as padded to repel any blows.

This whole spruce-up down below is not solely for your own pleasure. You are converting your basement into a sports room for all your family members and friends as well, so you can enjoy swinging a golf club or playing chess together!