Designer & home-décor blogger embraces DIY solution to create charming basement!

Problem

CROOKSVILLE, OHIO — Meet Krissy from "Home With Krissy", (formally Bold Boundless Blonde) – a twenty-something home-décor and DIY blogger, house flipper, designer and home stager. One thing is clear, the multi-talented, perpetually venturesome Kristine Abram is not your average do-it-yourselfer.

In 2017, Abram and her husband decided they were going to build a custom forever home, working alongside a contractor/builder. “We asked all of the contractors if they would itemize the work so that if we could “do-it-ourselves” we would know just how much we could save,” explains Abram.

Building a house from the ground up is, of course, easier said than done. But Abram was “determined to live her best life”. Abram’s Ohio farmhouse-style home acts as a creative lab for DIY experiments, such as a brick backsplash, white concrete countertops, and even a do-it-yourself TV Frame.

Abram grew up going to work with her contractor father, George Carr, who now works for a local, family-owned, modular home-building company. Abram views her father as a mentor and says he helped shape her passion for do-it-yourself projects.

“I take pride in the fact that I’ve done a lot of the work myself to create our dream house,” says Abram. Her projects have ranged from designing house plans to laying the flooring; from painting to doing the outside stonework; all the way to building the staircase railing and fireplace.

“Anything I thought I could tackle, I did,” says Abram, “and it ultimately grew my love for DIY even further — not to mention the benefit of saving all that money.”

In 2019, Abram decided to start a blog documenting her home-building experience and home projects. At the time, she had 7,000 Instagram followers. As Abram recorded her DIY projects, she became increasingly popular and certainly more creative, growing her DIY community and audience to a whopping 44,500 followers (@homewithkrissy).

Some would say she had it all, but Abram had one dream for her home that, for a time, she thought she would have to give up.

The plan, from the outset, was to build rooms in the basement for their kids once they were old enough — ideally with a half-bath. But according to Abram, the costs for the latter far outweighed the benefit.

“Our contractor said that the slope of our land would not allow us to build a conventional bathroom with below-floor drainage, and that we would have to install a sewage ejector pump to make it happen.” Abram and her husband decided to opt out of that part of the project.

A couple of months passed, and the couple finally had a beautifully finished basement. But one old idea came back to mind for the Abrams: “Man, we wish we had a bathroom down here.”

So Abram started doing research and found her perfect basement half-bath solution. Saniflo’s above-floor plumbing technology.

Solution

When Abram found out Saniflo had a macerator pump system, the Saniaccess 2, that can be used almost anywhere, she felt ecstatic! “You know what the best part is?” Abram starts. “The sink hooks right into the same macerating system as the toilet, so there is no need for an extra drain!”

The Saniaccess 2 is a 1/2 horsepower macerator pump system used to install a half-bathroom (toilet and sink) up to 15 feet below the sewer line, or even up to 150 feet from a soil stack. Designed to handle black-water waste from a toilet in residential applications, as Kristine notes above, the Saniaccess 2 will also discharge gray water from a sink. The wastewater drains into the system via a 1.5-inch inlet, which is located on the side of the pump housing. The unit has another side inlet that can be used for the vent.

“The product was the perfect solution for us,” says Abram, “because a half-bath is exactly what we wanted.”

Since Abram and her husband had already started framing out a basement storage room, the pair carved out a small, 30-square-foot space for a half-bath, located beneath the home’s master bathroom. The discharge pipe coming from the Saniaccess 2 runs 10 feet before connecting to the master bath’s drainage line that runs to the home’s septic tank.

Results

As Abram puts it, thanks to Saniflo, their “half-bath beauty” was born, “and it’s everything I could have wanted!” According to Abram’s father, the installation was straightforward and took only two evenings to install. “And that’s counting other unrelated distractions,” says Carr.

Once the toilet was fully installed and the vanity connected, Abram worked her interior design magic! “This new bathroom will be so helpful when the kids’ bedrooms are downstairs, and when we have events in the basement,” says Abram.

Abram reports the system is performing well and that, in fact, she would recommend Saniflo’s above-floor plumbing solution to her DIY community with confidence.

As Abram recently wrote to her Instagram followers: “Do you have a space you’ve been dreaming of adding a restroom to? Saniflo surely has a solution for you! They even have a system that supports a shower!”

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ABOUT SANIFLO

SFA SANIFLO U.S.A. – whose parent company originated macerating plumbing technology — offers a complete line of waste and drainage pumping systems for residential and commercial applications. Saniflo developed its innovative, “above-floor plumbing” technology more than a half-century ago and has led its commercialization worldwide. Today, the company markets macerating technology through 24 subsidiaries in 50 countries and has sold more than seven million units worldwide since 1958. Saniflo markets through independent sales agents throughout North America, and the product line is currently available at distributor and dealer locations throughout the United States and Canada.

For more information, contact Saniflo at 1-800-571-8191. Or visit the Saniflo website at saniflo.com.

For editorial assistance, including photography, contact John O’Reilly c/o GreenHouse Digital + PR: 815-469-9100 or [email protected].

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