I watched the movie “This is the End,” and there’s a plot point where the characters need something from the basement. But, the only way to get to the basement is to go outside and go through double doors that are in the ground, but slanted up a bit. There was no way to get to the basement from inside the house. I think the basement in Arachnophobia also worked like this.
My question is, is this a common way to design basements? Why wouldn’t you want to at least put a trap door or a spiral staircase so you could get to the basement from inside the house? What is the benefit of designing basements this way?
Note: I’m not referring to detached storm cellars like Sally Field had in that movie where her husband gets killed and she had to take over the cotton farm.
Our house is like this but it should be noted it’s a 100 year old farm house.
Back in the day people didn’t regularly go in the cellar except during storms or to put-up and retrieve preserves and root veg that was put away for the winter.
Does the house have an inner staircase? If it does, then putting the one going to the basement right under that one doesn’t take up extra space, but if it doesn’t, that amount of real space can be significant. A spiral staircase takes up less space, but wider and more difficult to enclose: if you don’t enclose it, heating up the house would require heating up the basement as well. They’re also more difficult to navigate.
This right here. It’s a common “storm cellar” design in farmhouses built around 1900ish or earlier. You didn’t have a water heater, furnace, etc., so the cellar was mostly for cold storage and hiding from tornadoes.
The last house I lived in had one, but sometime in the interim someone also built an addition on the back of the house and then put an entry to the basement in there, as well. Due to space constraints, it was kind of narrow and rickety - by comparison the storm cellar slanted-door entry was much safer and easier to navigate. I can easily imagine a house like that where no addition was built and there just wasn’t room to add an interior staircase once things like furnaces and the like were installed in the basement.
Houses continued to have them at least into the 50s, even when there was an inside access. It was a convenient way to move things: if you didn’t have a garage, you could keep a lawnmower or other tools in the basemen. They still make them, though I suspect they are usually used as replacements on older houses.
if the house was two story, the difference between a stairway to the basement or not is a closet on the first floor; this might be significant in a small house.
It’s probably not realistic for a large modern house, but just down the road from where I live there’s a house that was built about 20 years ago that only has outside access to the basement. This was a pre-fab rancher style house though. One truck brought in the front half of the house and another truck brought in the second half.
About ten years ago the family that lived there finished the basement. But you still have to go outside to get to it.
At least in New England, new houses have bulkhead doors as a pretty standard feature, even if you have interior stairs. It’s nice to be able to get into the basement from outside as well as inside.
Every so often, youll find a house that was built with no basement - just a crawlspace, and some enterprising person decides to start digging to make a basement under the house. Unless they want a trap door somewhere inside the house, a bulkhead door is the only viable option.
Basically this. I think there was a very brief mention (during a scene where all the guys are panicking and talking over each other) about how it was just for storage. It was unfinished space, which is another small supporting point.
Roddy
Thanks for the responses. So, it looks like there are historical usage, or space-saving, or energy saving reasons not to have a direct connection to the basement. And, you might choose to construct your basement this way if you think the end of the world is coming and you just want to add some artificial excitement to your survival strategies.
The house I grew up in, a 1950s vintage ranch north of Boston, had both the indoor trap door, and the angled doors outside leading to the basement. During one of the renovations that my parents performed in the 40ish years they’ve lived there, they put in hardwood flooring, and sealed the trap door so as to have a smooth finish on the floor.
The stairway is still there, under the floor, but you can’t access the house from the basement directly.
An add-on part of the house has another basement area, but only has the interior trap door, with no access from the outside. The two basement areas are not accessible from each other.
We have both an interior stairway down to the basement and bulkhead doors outside, but we never use the bulkhead doors (we don’t have enough of a yard to bother with a mower) and, in fact, the outside doorway is boarded over.