Retirement isn't what it used to be. While previous generations may have settled comfortably into spending one's twilight years at home or on the golf course, the baby boomer generation is again revolutionizing popular trends, and looking to reinvent retirement as we know it. Naturally, the people who are changing retirement are also changing their homes to fit their plans, and ushering in a new era of pragmatic remodeling known as "aging-in-place."

One local boomer, the owner of a classic brick Tudor in Seattle's Greenlake neighborhood, sought to remodel her unfinished basement to accommodate a whole spectrum of life phases to come. For her requirements she called upon the help of Cathy Gaspar of Gaspar's Construction, a residential design/build firm in Seattle. The client was only 50 years old, but expressed a desire for a house revamp that would not only meet her present needs, but would also work for her future interests.  

The remodeled space would have to accommodate three major life stages:  At the time of the remodel, her daughter lived at home, so the client wanted to create a fun and private place for her daughter and her daughter's friends to hang out in. In the early half of her retirement, while she was still healthy and active, the client wanted to be able to rent the upstairs and utilize the basement space as a completely separate apartment, where she could live when she wasn't out traveling the world. For the third stage, the client wished to use the space as adjoining living quarters for either a live-in caretaker or her adult daughter.  

The space wasn't a lot to look at when the project began. The basement was completely unfinished and included a former garage space that had been walled in years before, as part of the overall footprint. Due to this design quirk, the wall that separated the "garage" from the rest of the basement had extra firewall protection and was structurally challenging to work with. Additionally, the floor of the former parking space was higher than the rest of the basement. Gaspar's leveled the parking area, and then ripped out the existing flooring before installing radiant heating throughout the floor of the entire basement. 


Two members of the Gaspar crew install radiant flooring.