Basement Remodeling in Edina

What’s included in a Knutson basement remodel

Envelope and moisture control — spray foam at the rim joist, a review of how water moves around the foundation perimeter, and a sump evaluation before any framing decisions get made.

Framing and insulation — built to current code, with fire-blocking handled correctly at every floor and ceiling transition.

Egress — an Edina rambler’s original basement openings are almost always glass block, and glass block does not meet the opening size a legal bedroom requires. We cut the new opening, frame the well, and coordinate the window install as one sequence rather than three separate trips.

Electrical and mechanical — circuits added where the finished layout needs them, a panel evaluation if the house is due for one, and duct sizing that matches the new square footage rather than borrowing capacity from the floor above.

Plumbing — rough-in for a bath, a wet bar, or a second kitchen, with a grinder pump specified wherever gravity drainage won’t reach the main line.

Cabinetry and millwork — the bar, the wine wall, the media surround: built in our shop and installed to the same joinery standard as a kitchen renovation, because for a lot of Edina clients, it’s the same design conversation continued one floor down.

Finish trades — drywall, flooring, trim, paint, and lighting, held to the standard already set on your main level rather than a lesser one reserved for basements.

Why Edina homeowners choose Knutson

The gap between a basement that’s finished and a basement that’s finished well almost always comes down to cabinetry, trim, and lighting detail — the parts that separate a rec room from a real living space. Because our cabinet shop builds the bar, media wall, and any custom millwork in-house, an Edina basement can carry the same design language as a kitchen or bath renovation we did upstairs, rather than reading as a separate, lesser project tacked onto the house.

The second reason is what’s underneath the finish. A missed vapor detail or an undersized sump doesn’t show up until the basement starts smelling musty two Augusts later, and by then it’s a tear-out, not a touch-up. Four decades of finishing Twin Cities basements means we’ve seen every version of that failure during demo — which is why we build to avoid it from the start.