A second home under the same roof A full legal suite, built so family could live close by and still live independently.
What the client wanted
A family member needed a place of their own without moving out of the house. That meant a mother in law suite in the proper sense, not a finished basement with a spare bedroom. Separate kitchen, separate bathroom, separate laundry, separate heating, so that whoever lived there was not sharing the working parts of the home.
The basement was unfinished, and there was no laundry down there at all, so every service the suite needed had to be created rather than adapted.
They also wanted a say in almost every finish. Flooring, tile, paint, cabinetry, lighting and hardware were all chosen rather than taken as standard, and the specification kept developing as the build went on.
What Alta Home delivered
A 780 square foot one bedroom suite: bedroom with egress window, walk in closet, living room, kitchen, bathroom, laundry, storage and mechanical room.
What makes it legal rather than simply finished is the mechanical side. The suite has its own furnace and HVAC, interconnected smoke and CO2 alarms, a smoke sealed mechanical room and self closing entrance doors. A new concrete landing, stairs and railing were built outside for the permit, and the laundry was roughed in from nothing.
The finishes match the house above rather than a basement standard. A quartz kitchen with floating shelves, puck lighting and a waterfall island, and a fully tiled, waterproofed bathroom with a heated floor, custom vanity and glass shower partition.
What was included
- Approx. 780 sq ft self contained legal suite
- New concrete landing, stairs and railing to the suite entrance
- New laundry room built from scratch, including drain, water and dryer venting rough in
- Full kitchen with painted MDF cabinets, birch liners and quartz countertops
- Island with waterfall edge and undermount microwave, slab cut and repoured for power Floating shelves in place of upper cabinets, with strip lighting and sixteen puck lights
- Tiled backsplash running to the ceiling around the shelving
- Fully tiled and waterproofed bathroom with a custom tiled pony wall and glass shower partition
- Heated bathroom floor on a dedicated circuit and thermostat
What we worked through
There was no laundry down there
Not a laundry that needed moving, none at all. Drain, water supply and dryer venting all had to be roughed in from scratch, and the room built and finished around them.
The entrance had to be rebuilt to satisfy the permit
A legal suite needs its entrance to meet requirements, and that meant building a new concrete landing and stairs with railing outside before the suite could pass.
Powering an island in the middle of a concrete floor
To put the island where the clients wanted it, with an undermount microwave, the slab had to be cut, the electrical run, and the concrete repoured.
A specification that kept moving
The clients chose almost every finish themselves and kept refining as the build progressed, which ran to a long list of change orders across tile, flooring, paint, cabinetry, lighting and hardware. Holding the schedule and the build quality steady through that is its own piece of work.