If you are making any additions, improvements or repairs to your home you must pull a building permit, and if it involves electrical or plumbing work you'll also need to pull an electric permit and/or plumbing permit.

"But Why?" you might ask....

In the here and now, you need to pull the appropriate permits because that is what Harrisonburg and Rockingham County require of you.  Also in the here and now, pulling the permits will thus require inspections, which will go a long way towards assuring that the changes made to your house are safe, per their compliance with the Building Code.

In the future --- as in the time when you want to then sell your home --- it is arguably very important to have pulled building permits and to have passed the inspections.

In selling your home, you are required to disclose any material adverse facts about your home.  In my view, the fact that the basement was finished (or other improvements were made) without permits and inspections is a material adverse fact about the house.  It's not necessarily that the house is unsafe, but the fact that parts of the home were never inspected by the locality create that possibility.

Pull the permits.  Get the inspections!