At the moment we have a rather large storage / mechanical / furnace room in the basement of our house here in Calgary, Canada. The room has our furnace, hot water tank, freezer and a lot of shelves in it. It is easily large enough to be changed to a storage / furnace room and another room that could be used as an office or study (the window is too small for a bedroom).

One of the concerns about that room is the width of the door. A door to a mechanical / furnace room need to be large enough to fit the hot water tank and furnace out of it without any problems. Currently the door is 30”, or 76cm wide, which is technically too small to meet code for a furnace room. The door should be 32”, or 82cm wide to allow proper access.

To further complicate matters, if we were to put the door to the mechanical / furnace room in the newly created office space both the door to the office AND the door to the utility room would need to be the full 32” / 82cm wide since the hot water tank and furnace would need to go through both rooms.

It’s kind of funny / annoying that moving in here we were told and thought that to add another room in that area would be easy, but we are very quickly realising that nothing is every as easy as it looks.