The brief: bring a '90s-era basement up to the rest of the house
The Richmond, BC homeowners had updated the upstairs of their home over the years but the basement had been left in its original state — yellow walls, beige wall-to-wall carpet, dated tile in the back-entry mudroom, hollow-core doors, and a mechanical closet whose door wouldn't even close cleanly. They wanted the whole level brought up to the same finish level as the main floor: continuous engineered hardwood, white walls, modern doors and hardware, and one real feature wall in the family room to give the space a focal point.
Demo, drywall and prepping the feature wall
The first week was demo: out went the carpet, underlay, tile, hollow-core doors and most of the existing trim. The big structural drop beam in the family room ceiling stayed (it's holding the floor above), but the wall under it got opened up to plan power and venting for the new linear electric fireplace and to give us a clean substrate for the paneled surround that would wrap it. With drywall patched, skim-coated and primed, the rooms were ready for trim and finish.
Custom wall-to-wall built-in shelving
On the side wall of the family room, under the sloping bulkhead where the stair runs above, we built a wall-to-wall custom shelving unit out of MDF — five tall bays, six shelves high, with a continuous painted carcass and adjusted shelf depths to follow the slope of the ceiling. Painted in the same crisp white as the walls and trim, it reads as part of the architecture rather than a piece of furniture sitting in front of a wall, and it gives the family room enough storage to keep the rest of the space clear.
The feature wall: shaker panelling and a built-in linear fireplace
The focal wall in the family room got a full shaker-style panelled surround — a grid of recessed panels framed in MDF, painted white to match the rest of the room — with a wide built-in linear electric fireplace set into the centre at sitting height. The panel grid is centred on the fireplace, with continuous bottom rail acting as a hearth-height shelf and a wider top panel as the mantel. The result is a real architectural feature wall, not a TV stuck on drywall.
New doors and hardware throughout
Every hollow-core door on the level was replaced with solid-core Shaker doors — single doors at the mechanical room and bathroom, a pair of full-height double Shaker doors on the new storage room, and tall bifolds at the hallway closets. All of them got the same modern brushed nickel square lever sets, so the hardware reads as one consistent set across the whole basement. With the floors and trim continuous through the doorways, the level finally feels like one finished space instead of a series of patched-together rooms.
