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My fiancee and I are buying our first house (woo hoo!), and my plan is to use the basement as my new studio/shop space.

For a sense of the scope of the project, the basement is around 450ft^2. It’s an old house, from around 1920. No particular leak or other issues came up on the inspection. Some spalling, but a contractor we brought in to take a look seemed pretty convinced that’s due to the age of the foundation rather than any particular moisture issue.

I’m not intending or needing the space to be super pretty in any way. I just wanted to insulate so it’s useable through the winter. No flooring, ceiling or bathrooms would be involved. I would plan to bring in experts to put in some outlets and a slop sink and install new windows.

As far as timeline goes, I’m comfortable continuing to rent a my current work space for at least a few months if needed, and I can devote a lot of time to get this done.

I run a small puppet company and I’m very used to building sets, props and lots of things that involve a variety of tools and materials. I’m no stranger to any of the tools involved here. But I’ve never owned a home before, didn’t grow up in a very DIY house, so things that need to fit building codes, or deal with the potential moisture issues of a basement are all new to me. I’ve looked at a few youtube tutorials and the steps seem fully doable with my experience. What I’m worried about is whether I’d be addressing correctly any issues that were particular to our basement, our climate, and the regulations where I live.

I’m in the Hudson Valley of NY and all my searches for the relevant building codes for my town have pointed me towards these regulations: https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2015NY I’m having a hell of a time teasing out which parts of this are relevant and what I actually have to know and a lot of it feels like jargon to me, largely jargon that I won’t need to know, but I feel like I need to learn to figure out if I need to know it.

So here are my questions.

1) Is this a reasonable project to take on?

2) Any tips for cutting to the chase and finding the applicable regulations without spending a week combing through hundreds of pages of cross referenced jargon?

3) Are there professionals I could/should bring in to help make the plans, ensure they’re up to code short of hiring a contractor to do the job?

Thanks so much for reading through this! Very grateful for any info you can share.