I grew up in a slab ranch in Ohio. Only about half my friends had basements, and I can’t think of any that were “finished.” I don’t have any fond memories of playing in basements.
I bought a house in the neighborhood that I grew up in, a house WITH a basement. To be honest, I am not a huge fan of it. I’ve already spent a bunch of money to keep it dry and am still pretty paranoid about water. It’s just cold and depressing down there. I don’t have that much stuff, so other than my washer, dryer and doggy bathtub everything stored down there is other people’s stuff.
If I ever want to enjoy the space, I have to put a ton of money to make it livable. It doesn’t have a bathroom or even proper electrical outlets (aside from the one for the laundry area).
The house I just bought has a “crawlspace basement”. The property is so sloped that the front of the house is just a few feet off the ground but in the back there’s a door at ground level that opens into a walk-in basement. About 10-12 feet of the basement has a concrete floor and the rest of the space under the house is bare earth (covered with plastic) with the furnace about halfway up the slope. Someday I might close off the floored area and turn it into a workshop.
Basements are great. They are the perfect place for your furnace, water-heater, washing machines, long-term storage, etc. etc. when you live in an urban environment with a lot of houses packed close together.
Only 20% of the houses on the military base have basements. We were given storage sheds in the back in lieu of basement, because most people had come from areas of the country where basements are the norm.
may I add a GQ question to this thread?:
What’s a crawlspace for?
Basements --I can understand.**
But a crawlspace? Huh? What’s the point?
**(but I don’t really like 'em. They’re often cold, dirty, ugly, depressing places with a noisy sump pump, full of spiders and icky stuff. Unpleasant places. Sure you can pay a lot of money to turn it into a kid’s playroom or extra space to mount deer antlers on the wall, but why do it underground? )
Basements seem to be chosen, or not, based on local climate and water conditions.
Basements are the norm in the Greater Toronto Area and Southern Ontario. Yet even here, many “cottages” don’t have them. Technically, cottages are buildings not intended for year-round habitation, which means that they don’t have the proper adaptations for winter use: good insulation, good heating systems, double doors and windows, water pipes located in inside walls so as not to freeze, etc.
I know someone who lived in a former cottage that had been winterized in Keswick, one of the old beach town on Lake Simcoe north of Toronto, and their place had no basement. It had a crawlspace. My friend had to go down there once and came out covered in spiders.
I’ll take a slab before a crawlspace. (Many commercial buildings are built slab-on-grade here, though.)
If the ground freezes where you live, a basement is a must unless you’re in a floodplain, for the reasons Spoons noted.
If a basement is built by a competent builder, there’s no reason anyone has to feel they are dark, damp, cold, spider-infested, etc. The only difference is that there are no windows, or the windows are up by the ceiling.
chappachula - crawlspaces are to hide all of the mechanical stuff that belongs in the basement. That way instead of walking up to your furnace/water heater/etc to fix it in a well lit room, you get to low crawl across a dirty, cold, spider infested concrete slab to do so in the dark. Good times.
I love basements so much that I have TWO. When the previous owners built a two story addition on to the back of my house they dug underneath it and expanded the basement. There’s a big main room with the laundry stuff, some workbenchs, and a toilet, then under the addition there are two more rooms. Neither one has a light fixture, and one of them has a very mysterious dark splatter on the wall. Weird.
I believe we told our buyer’s agent that we wanted a either a basement or an attic when we were looking at houses. Lucky us, we got both!
Most basements do have windows, though. They are part of the house here, no doubt about it. Another factor is the lack of air conditioning in most of the Prairies - for the month of the year that it would be nice, most people don’t bother with it. A lot of people, however, spend their summers in their basement where it stays cool year round. It is quite common to have a media room, bathroom, and extra bedroom down there. Those of you who think basements are icky places just haven’t seen them done right.
Down here we put a lot of that outside. The advantage of a crawlspace in an area where you can’t have a basement is that if something goes wrong with a major thing that’s under the house you can actually fix it if you have a crawlspace.
Basements are common here. My cousin’s house didn’t have one, so they dug out the crawlspace and made one. They actually dug it themselves – buckets of dirt passed out a small window. When finished, it was split level. They put a pool table in the lower section, and the higher level was a family room with a foldout couch, TV, bookshelves, etc. The laundry and furnace were in the basement, and a toilet and shower.
Our basement is partly finished – it even has a small kitchen and a half bath. The other section is a workshop, and where we keep the catboxes. The house is a hundred years old and the bedroom closets are small, so the extra storage space is appreciated.
I could live in this area without a basement, if some other (comfortable) storm shelter was close by, but I wouldn’t like it.
Basements are not common where I live (Texas panhandle), although I have no idea why. If I had to guess, I’d say that omitting the basement keeps construction costs low. That’s not to say that homes with basements don’t exist, but those that do have basements tend to be larger and more expensive homes that use the basement for media rooms and the like. “Unfinished” basements are definitely not the norm.
Water heaters go in the garage, and winters are sufficiently mild that we don’t need “furnaces”, so there’s no need to put any such equipment in the basement; the outdoor heat pump unit is sufficient. I’m guessing that one reason for having a basement and putting a furnace in it is to prevent frozen pipes, correct? Even on slab foundations, it just doesn’t get cold enough here to have much of a problem in that area.
Another factor in this area might be space; we have tons of it. So, you can spread things out horizontally over a larger lot and have a good-sized home, whereas in other parts of the country you have to go vertical.
Not once have I seen a house with a crawlspace in my city. They may exist, but I haven’t seen 'em. We did have a crawlspace in the house I grew up in, though, in New Mexico. Which reminds me: while we were living there, my parents dug out an area next to our house, created a new entryway down to it, and made a sort of downstairs rec room, plus another bedroom for my brother. It wasn’t under the house, so I’m not sure that it qualified as a “basement”, which may have been the problem. Anyway, in many ways it was kind of a nightmare. It got really cold down there in the winter, and the only heat was provided by a woodstove. I have no problem with woodstoves, but the smoke wouldn’t draw well until the chimney warmed up, so you’d basically start the fire and clear out for an hour or more while the smoke cleared (took forever, since there really wasn’t anywhere for it to vent from the room). And the roof leaked something fierce, despite multiple attempts to seal it; the pool table had to be covered religiously, because the cover would often have little puddles on it from dripping water. So, my early experiences with underground rooms have not been very positive. Still, I’m not opposed; I’d love one of those media rooms I see every year at the Parade of Homes.
I was also raised in a house with a basement, and always imagined buying a house with a basement.
Of course, as these things go, we ended up with a house that doesn’t have a basement. Now I love it, we never have to deal with the annual flooding that I remember from childhood (and I see our neighbors struggling with this every year). And we have a storage shed in the back to keep things that most people keep in basements.
Here on the Coastal Prairie, within reach of tropical weather, floods are all too common. I think 2001’s Tropical Storm Allison caused more damage to the city than Hurricane Ike. (Not so for Galveston & other nearby areas within reach of storm surge. They’re still in bad shape.)
And our mild winters don’t demand heavy duty furnaces. One of the more exotic scenes in most This Old House series is Richard’s trip down to the basement, to explain why the giant monstrosity of a furnace has to go.
Mixed emotions here, because our basement walls leak in heavy rain or when the gutters overflow. But other than that little drawback…
A basement makes wiring a lot easier.
If I need multi-room speakers,
or TV cables in multiple rooms,
or new electrical outlets,
or new phone outlets,
or hardwired ethernet,
the basement makes it pretty easy.
I’ve run wiring through the attic and it’s not as much fun.
My house is fairly small, and the basement holds the main bookshelves, the furnace, the washer/dryer, the holiday decorations, a pingpong table, an art room, a dartboard, a photo studio (with a low ceiling), an emergency restroom, the sewing table, the ironing board, our luggage, the archived clothing.
And a dehumidifier to make it all usable.
The outdoor potted plants winter in the basement, as well.
Or in Louisiana. Our house there didn’t have one. Our house in California doesn’t either - no houses I know of here do.
The house I grew up in in NY did, and the house we had in NJ, where it was standard. It had a sump pump which worked. Before we closed we made sure to drop in right after a big rainstorm.
My workbench is in the garage, not the basement, as is the junk we stored there. Finished basements give you some more bonus living space, but either way is fine with me.
Tornado shelter, furnace/water heater room, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, stable foundation below the frost level, extra storage, and still space for a media room (where a lack of big windows isn’t a problem).
As for flooding, I’ve had to deal with more roof leaks then basement leaks.
I agree with all of this. We just finished our unfinished basement last year and essentially doubled our living space - two extra bedrooms, a full bath with steam shower, and a giant media room/playroom/office with a 60 inch plasma TV and surround sound. It’s great for guests - they get their own room with bathroom, and great for the kids, because they can play with their toys to their hearts’ content and I don’t need to worry about constantly tidying our upstairs. It’s not “basementy” at all - the windows in the bedrooms are dug down below grade so there’s lots of light, and the ceilings are standard height. It was worth every penny we spent on it.
I don’t have a basement now and I really wish that I did just to hold the furnace and the laundry and to have storage for stuff like boxes, luggage and tools.
It would depend almost entirely on a) the square footage of the house above the ground, and b) the presence or absence of a garage (and the storage space within). I gots to have my storage space.
No garage + small square footage + no basement = dealbreaker.
When the previous owners built a two story addition on to the back of my house they dug underneath it and expanded the basement. There’s a big main room with the laundry stuff, some workbenchs, and a toilet, then under the addition there are two more rooms. Neither one has a light fixture, and one of them has a very mysterious dark splatter on the wall. Weird.