Recreation & family room
The most common brief: one large flexible room, proper lighting, and enough outlets that nothing runs on an extension cord.
Basement development, done to code.
The square footage is already there — it just has no walls in it yet. We design, permit and build finished basements across Edmonton and the surrounding capital region, and we do the unglamorous parts properly: moisture, headroom, egress and inspections.
Scope
What ends up down there
Most basements become some combination of these. The layout is worth arguing about early — moving a wall on a drawing costs nothing, moving it after the drywall is up costs a week.
Bedrooms with egress
A below-grade bedroom needs a code-compliant escape window. Where the existing opening is too small, that means cutting the foundation and building a window well.
Bathroom or ensuite
Adding a basement bathroom means drainage below the slab. Whether that is a straightforward tie-in or a sewage ejector pump depends on where your main stack sits.
Home office & gym
Quiet rooms, which is mostly an insulation and door question. Gyms also need floor build-up that can take dropped weight.
Wet bar & kitchenette
Cabinetry, a sink, and the plumbing and ventilation to support them — the step short of a full second kitchen.
Legal secondary suite
A self-contained rentable dwelling. A different category of project with its own permit path — see below.
Below grade
A basement is not just a room with less daylight.
It sits against wet soil, it holds the mechanical guts of the house, and its ceiling height is whatever the builder left you. Every basement job lives or dies on these four things, and all four are decided before a single stud goes up.
Headroom is fixed
You cannot raise a basement ceiling. What you can do is route ducts and beams so the low spots land over a hallway or a closet instead of over the sofa. This gets decided on the drawings, not on site.
Water comes first
Nobody should be framing walls against a foundation that leaks. We look at grading, downspouts, the sump and any staining on the slab before quoting finishes.
The mechanical room stays reachable
Furnace, hot water tank, panel and shut-offs all need clearance and access. Boxing them in behind finished walls is a classic basement mistake and it fails inspection.
Insulation is an assembly, not a product
Below-grade walls need the right layers in the right order for the climate they sit in. Get the vapour control wrong and you get condensation inside the wall, which you will not see until it is mould.
Process
Ten stages, in this order
Nothing here is optional and nothing here is out of sequence. The inspection sits deliberately between rough-in and drywall — once walls are closed, opening them again is demolition.
Site visit
We measure, photograph, and look at the things that decide feasibility: headroom, window openings, the mechanical room, the panel, and any sign of moisture.
Layout & scope
A drawn layout plus a written scope — room by room, with what is included and what is not. Nothing is demolished before you have both.
Permits
We prepare and submit the building permit application, and the trade permits that go with it. Applications are made in our name.
Demolition & prep
Clearing the space, protecting the rest of the house, and dealing with anything the site visit flagged — drainage, cracks, old wiring.
Framing
Walls, bulkheads and door openings go in. This is the stage where the layout stops being a drawing and you can walk it.
Rough-in
Electrical, plumbing and HVAC inside the open walls, each by a ticketed trade pulling their own permit.
Inspection
The city inspects the framing and rough-in before anything is covered. Work stops here until it passes — that is the point of the stage.
Insulation & drywall
The wall assembly closes up: insulation, vapour control, boarding, taping and a sanded finish ready for paint.
Finishes
Flooring, trim, doors, paint, fixtures, cabinetry. The long tail of a renovation, and where a schedule is usually won or lost.
Final inspection & handover
Final city inspection, deficiency walk-through with you, and the paperwork: permits closed, warranties and manuals handed over.
Permits & inspections
We pull the permits. In our name.
A permit is not paperwork friction — it is the mechanism that gets an independent inspector to look inside your walls before they are closed. That is worth having.
- Building permit for the development itself, prepared and submitted by us.
- Trade permits for electrical, plumbing and gas, pulled by the licensed trade doing that work.
- Development permit as well, if the project is a secondary suite.
- Inspections booked and attended — we meet the inspector on site rather than leaving you to.
- Permits closed at handover, so the file is clean when you refinance or sell.
Specific code requirements — headroom, egress opening sizes, fire separation, ventilation — are confirmed against the building code in force in your province and municipality when your drawings are prepared. We do not quote them from memory, and neither should anyone else.
Secondary suites
Planning to rent it out? Say so on day one.
A legal secondary suite is a separate dwelling inside your house, and it is held to a higher standard than a finished basement — fire separation, sound separation, its own entrance and kitchen, ventilation, alarms, parking. Almost all of it is structural or in-wall.
Which is why it cannot sensibly be added later. Converting a finished basement into a legal suite usually means tearing out work you have already paid for. If a suite is even a maybe, we design for it now and you decide later.
Budget
What actually moves the number
We do not publish a price per square foot, because the honest answer is that two basements of identical size can differ enormously. These are the things that decide it — and all of them are visible on a site visit, which is why we insist on doing one before quoting.
- Whether a bathroom is going in, and whether its drain can tie into the existing stack or needs a pump.
- How many egress windows have to be cut into the foundation.
- Whether ducting has to be re-routed to protect headroom.
- Whether the electrical panel has spare capacity or needs an upgrade.
- Whether the project is a finished basement or a legal secondary suite — the suite requirements add real scope.
- Finish level: builder-grade versus tile, millwork and built-ins.
FAQ
Basement questions we get asked
Do I need a permit to finish my basement?
Yes. Finishing a basement is regulated construction, and a building permit is required — the exact process differs between municipalities but the requirement does not. Electrical, plumbing and gas work each carry their own trade permits, pulled by the licensed trade doing that work. Creating a secondary suite usually adds a development permit on top. We prepare and submit these as part of the job — you should be suspicious of any contractor who offers to skip them.
What happens if the previous owner finished it without a permit?
It is common and it is fixable, but it has to be dealt with honestly. Unpermitted work can surface during a sale, an insurance claim, or a later permit application. Depending on what was done, the path is usually an inspection and remediation of whatever does not meet code. We will tell you what we find before we quote.
Can every basement have a bedroom?
Only if it can have a compliant egress window and the required headroom. Cutting a new escape opening into a concrete foundation and building the window well outside is normal work, but it is real work — it affects both the price and the schedule, so it gets decided at the drawing stage.
How is a legal secondary suite different from a finished basement?
A finished basement is more of your own home. A secondary suite is a separate dwelling that someone else can rent, so it is held to a different standard: its own entrance, kitchen and bathroom, fire separation from the main house, interconnected smoke alarms, sound separation, ventilation, and parking. It is a bigger project with a longer approval path, and it needs to be planned as a suite from the start rather than converted later.
What about radon?
Radon is worth taking seriously anywhere in Canada, and a basement renovation is the natural time to deal with it because the slab and the walls are open. Health Canada recommends testing every home with a long-term test. If your result comes back high, mitigation is a well-understood job. We can rough in for it while the walls are open, which is much cheaper than retrofitting later.
Will the basement be cold?
Not if the wall assembly and the heat supply are done properly. Cold basements are usually an insulation problem, an air-sealing problem, or a furnace that was never balanced to serve the extra rooms. All three are design decisions made before framing, not fixes applied afterwards.
Where do you build basements?
Edmonton and the surrounding capital region — St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, Leduc, Beaumont, Fort Saskatchewan, Devon, Morinville and the communities between them. Renovation is the local half of the business; Newergy's engineering, solar and IT divisions work across Canada. If you are further out, call and ask: sometimes it works and sometimes we will tell you honestly that it does not.
Renovation
The rest of this side of the business
Get started
Book a site visit
Tell us roughly what you are picturing and where you are. We will come and measure, look at the things that decide feasibility, and come back with a layout and a written scope.
