I Turned My Cobwebby Basement Into a Home Gym—and Indoor Garden

This story is a part of New Year, New You, a package devoted to small, low-stress home improvement projects that, with a little effort, will dramatically improve your life.

My partner and I have been living in our house for nearly four years, and we’re still finding ways to improve it. Last year, for example, we turned our junk room into a breakfast nook. This summer, we covered our backyard in grow bags and produced enough peppers and tomatoes to stock a chest freezer. Over the holidays, my partner electrified the garage and installed a hoist that allowed us to transfer items into the sloped-roof attic without having to carry them one-handed up a rickety ladder.

This newly accessible storage space allowed us to begin tackling another task that had been on our to-do list since at least 2022: Cleaning out the basement, so we could turn it into an indoor garden and an in-home gym.

Technically, our house has two basements. There’s the original, brick-walled root cellar, which was undoubtedly built in the 1930s as a necessary component of the six-room cottage. As the house expanded, taking on wings and branching into back patios, the basement expanded as well. Right now we’ve got a cement-floored space that’s roughly the size of a one-bedroom apartment, if you count the root cellar as a bedroom—which is why we were so excited about transforming it into something more useful than a spiderwebby storage unit.

If you’re thinking about turning your basement into a more functional, multiuse space—whether or not you go the full gym/garden route—here is some of what we learned as we started using ours more effectively.

Get the minimum required equipment set up as soon as possible

You don’t need me to explain the benefits of stashing exercise equipment in a basement, once you can figure out how to safely maneuver the pieces down the stairs. In our case, we invited two friends to help. One of our friends brought over a set of forearm lifting straps, which we liked so much that we got our own set (they came with the hoist).

We’d been talking about moving that treadmill from the garage to the basement for nearly four years. We’d also been talking about cleaning out the basement. Eventually, we decided that we’d clean just enough basement to get the treadmill down there—which was probably the smartest way to start this entire process.

If we’d told ourselves that we had to complete the basement clean-out before we could install the treadmill, we would have procrastinated on both tasks forever. Now, every time we turn on our treadmill—which is pretty much every day, now that the weather has gotten so miserable that even I won’t go out in it—we see the possibilities of turning this space into a fully-functional home gym. We also see the rest of the junk in the basement—which makes us even more motivated to get rid of it.

Use what you have before researching what you need

Unbelievably, our outdoor garden was still producing grow-bag lettuces through the end of December. As delightful as it was to pick fresh arugula out of the backyard on Christmas morning, both my partner and I are aware that the long-term effects of climate change are more likely to be negative than positive. That’s why we’ve been looking for ways to create an indoor garden that could both rival and supplement our outdoor one.

Eventually, we’re going to want to do hydroponics—in the root cellar, naturally—but for now, we’re building our garden out of stuff we already have. We had an empty pot, so we put a basil plant in it. Then we attached a grow light to the rim. Then we cleaned out a second pot and put a rosemary plant in it. We started two huge batches of peppers in two more pots, and then—with no more empty pots on hand—we planted arugula in a 28-quart Sterilite storage bin. It just sprouted, and we’re hoping to plant spinach soon.

We also didn’t let our desire to set up an Olympic-class powerlifting station prevent me from working out with a set of PowerBlock dumbbells I bought in 2018. Yes, I know that barbells are better for coordinated symmetrical movements, and we actually have a weight bench and barbells we can use once we clear out the next section of the basement—but for now, we have dumbbells. That means I can lift weights today without waiting for tomorrow.

You may not have an extra pot sitting around, much less a plant to put into it. Don’t let that send you into a year-long research project for the best indoor gardening tools. Go to your local plant store—go to Amazon, if you have to—and get yourself the minimum amount of stuff required to get started. Then grow, grow, grow—whether it’s muscles, basil or endurance. You’ll know when it’s time to make your next purchase.

Give yourself something to work toward

My partner and I spent part of last night talking about what the basement could become, when we finally finished working on it. What we needed to throw away, and what we needed to take up the hoist into the attic above the garage—and then, what we might put on the walls and the floors and the shelves. An old green rug that doesn’t fit anywhere else in the house, probably. The prints from last year’s calendar, sticky-tacked above the shelves like a wallpaper border. The books I’ve written and the piano music he’s played, stacked neatly below. A work table, with one of those tool walls where there’s a hand-drawn outline for every tool.

"Wow," I said, after we had come up with all the ways in which the space could be transformed. "I’m going to start hauling stuff out of the basement tomorrow."

And I will—because I want to see that art and those tools on our walls. I also want to set up that weight bench and get the barbells installed, and there’s this lamp we haven’t been able to use that might fit perfectly next to the rug, and we could put colorful labels on the shelves and the plant pots, and none of this can happen until we clean out the other half of the basement. So we’ll get it done. Then we’ll start thinking about hydroponics.  

Top image via Getty Images

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