Ok going to be moving some time soon and the new house has a basement that I envision my super man cave gun room. problem is that it's a pretty low basement and It sticks up above ground about 1.5 feet.

Have any of you added on to your basement to make a room with a cement roof sunk lower? I did not see any like that in the gun room thread. Not sure what other options I have.


It would have been so much easier if I built the house but it is what it is. Wife gets to decorate the whole house and I I just asked for my man cave.

thanks

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There might be hidden solutions in the new home. A friend of mine noticed that the front porch of his home was brick over cinder block like the rest of his home but down in the basement the wall ran straight with the wall the front door is in. So he drilled a test hole high in the basement wall and borrowed a borescope. Turns out there was a fully walled off room the size of his front porch behind the cinder block wall. Enter a concrete saw, a custom vault door and new floor to ceiling bookshelves in the room beside the front porch and one gets an instant custom vault. The basement room looks like its his downstairs office, but swing out the middle bookshelf, and there is the hidden in-wall vault door that opens into the space under the front porch. Six sides of either poured concrete or cinder block, now that is pretty secure when most of it also has dirt covering 3 sides.

Also with some houses with poured walls, there ends up being weird angles in the basement walls. The sheet rock guys usually just follow the poured walls. If the angle and offset is big enough, the new owner can make the wall completely straight and have a long thin hidden room.

My basement had a weird room in the middle of the basement. The house originally had two 80 gallon water heaters and 3 HVAC furnace/air handlers in there. When the water heaters needed replace, I went with two Outdoor Rinnai on demand water heaters, put in a multi-zone HVAC system, and put the In-Law HVAC system in the basement storage room. This made a huge space to hide my two safes in behind a false wall in what now looks like an equipment room for the main HVAC. I mounted an empty alarm system panel box I bought at a flea market on the false wall and ran 16 false leads out of the box and have the alarm transformer plugged into a dummy outlet in the false wall.

One can always get creative with basements. Its just takes some exploring and planning or a healthy dose of money to make an opportunity if one doesn't already exist.
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I wouldn't go lower since you will run into water issues.

I have an unfinished basement and have been looking at dong the same thing.  My basement is a little over 8 ft. from the floot to the joists.  I was thinking about using 3" thick concrete panels for the roof

Any idea what he did for ventilation?  I have something similar in my house....

I'm buying a house with a similar under the front porch option for a vault. Would cutting a doorway into the basement wall compromise the strength of the foundation somehow?

I lost some irreplaceable guns by storing them in a basement.  Don't put anything that's important to you in your basement.

Not today, maybe not tomorrow, perhaps not next week, but -- someday -- your basement will flood and your guns will be destroyed.

This is the voice of experience talking.

the porch only goes in the ground about 4 feet sadly

My dad has a friend that makes bank vaults and I'm going to contact him and see what he has to say.