Basement Suite Screening
Film your basement on your phone and Basement Ready tells you whether it can become a legal second home in Ontario, and what it would take to build. I designed and built it on my own during the Meta Global AI Developer Hackathon, where it placed 3rd in the Indie Developer track.
A basement can become a home for a parent, a grown kid or a renter. But finding out if yours can means the building code, the fire code, the city’s by-laws, careful measurements and a designer, and thousands of dollars in drawings before you even know if it’s possible.
The homeowner films the basement once on their phone. Meta’s models find what’s down there, measure it in 3D without LiDAR, and check it against Ontario’s rules. A guide then takes them one step at a time: the answer, a layout, then a draft permit set. It asks only what it can’t see.
3rd place in the Indie Developer track at the Meta Global AI Developer Hackathon, which had 20,000 participants and 5,367 projects submitted. It’s live at basementready.com, with an example basement anyone can try without logging in.
The two-minute film I made for the hackathon. It follows one real basement from a single phone video to the answer, a layout in 3D and a draft permit set.
Hackathon submission film · one real basement, filmed once and run through the live site
The guide has three steps and does one job at a time. The answer comes first, because nobody should pay for a design before they know it’s possible.
While it checks the rules, the video plays back with every window, door, stair, duct and beam it found.
A measured plan, drawn from the video. Drag a wall and the code check runs again.
Layouts in 3D that keep the stairs, furnace and windows where they really are, with a rough cost.
A draft permit set, drawn and filled from the scan, with the few things only the homeowner can give.
Every finding has to point back to a moment in the homeowner’s own video, and every rule it applies shows where it comes from in the building code. If the video doesn’t show it, Basement Ready asks instead of guessing.
The answer is never “approved.” It says yes, yes after fixes, or not as it is, marks each fix on the measured plan, and leaves the final word to the city.
The hackathon asked for Meta’s models, so the whole pipeline is built on them, each with one job:
A homeowner could spend tens of thousands of dollars on this answer, so the product is careful about what it says and what it leaves to people.
Basement Ready never says “you qualify.” It says what looks possible, what needs fixing and what a designer or the city still has to confirm.
The video answers most questions. The few it can’t, like whether there are capped pipes for a bathroom, come one at a time with a line that says why it’s asking.
When it explains something like a fire separation, the answer names the section of the building code it comes from, so a homeowner or a designer can check it.
The finished-basement pictures are made from the homeowner’s own video and labelled “virtually staged,” so nobody mistakes an idea for a promise.
