Assuming that you live in a single family dwelling and not an apartment building or condo, do you have a basement? I’ve only lived in one house that had one. I wish I had one now because I live in tornado alley but they are extremely rare here and non-existent in newer homes.
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Northeast, yes. Basements are common in cold zones because foundations have to be excavated below the frost line anyway.
I’ve never lived in a house without one, since around here you have to get the foundations below the frost line.
No. I’ve never lived in a house with a basement other than visiting or an extended stay. I grew up and still live in SoCal, and all the houses I’ve lived in have been on slabs.
Sames as the others. In the colder states seeing a house without a basement would be odd. Just as, I understand, a house in Florida with a basement would be.
Yes, but I’m in the Chicago area, where pretty much every home has either a full basement, or at least a crawl space, for the frost line reasons that @TriPolar and @Northern_Piper noted.
My sister-in-law, who lives about 20 miles away from us, only has a crawl space; buying a house without a full basement is a decision that she and her husband regularly regret. Not only would they have liked more accessible storage space, but their furnace is in the crawl space, and getting to it to service it is a royal pain.
I’ve never lived in a home without a basement.
Putting a furnace in a crawl space sounds like construction malpractice.
Lived in single-family Michigan houses (except for those few years I lived in a condo in Chicago) my whole life, and they’ve always had basements.
Yes. DC suburbs. Sitting in it right now.
I’m in the ‘other’ category. In front range CO, we normally have basements or crawlspaces for the cold weather reasons related earlier. In our case, it’s pretty much too big to be called a crawlspace, but isn’t really a basement. In our case, there’s a roughly meter square entrace in the back of a ‘ground floor’ closet, which lets you into the space. It has concrete walls for the foundation, and a concrete slab on which the furnace rests, but the floor is otherwise dirt. About 8 ft from dirt to the beams supporting the floor overhead. One single overhead light for the whole area, but at least it has it’s own lighting.
So I get about 80% of the advantage of the basement, in that it’s quite big, lots of storage space, and much easier to access the furnace than a ‘traditional’ crawlspace, but it loses points for the dirt floor and the difficulty of entering/exiting.
I’ve never lived in a house or apartment building that didn’t have one. However, I can only think of two single family homes (old friends from high school) that didn’t have a basement in Chicagoland & Milwaukee.
Quite common. Quite stupid too. Crawl spaces can be weatherized, so they are the equivalent of a short unfinished basement, and aside from the service issue they’re not unreasonable.
The crawl space in my last house was about 3 feet tall. Is that more or less than you’re talking about?
Exactly. Basements are common in the North East and handy. Getting a nice dry & high full basement was a big selling point for our current house.
I actually don’t like slab and really don’t like crawl spaces.
Southern Merrylande with a 1624 square ft basement under a house of the same size. It’s semi-finished, but we don’t need more living space, so mostly for storage, laundry, and a play area for our granddaughter. Plus my treadmill lives there in front of the TV.
I would say we have more of a cellar than a basement. I’m not using the sort of classical/NYC definition of a basement, where a big chunk of it extends above ground level, but I don’t really have a full floor underneath either way…more a concrete slab storage area with pipes and heating and water heater that extends to less than half the house area, though it does also have a sort of cool enclosed area directly underneath the massive central chimney.
The one at my in-laws’ house is probably around 3’ or so tall (maybe a bit taller), yes. I imagine that having the furnace in the crawl space was consistent with the building code (otherwise, it wouldn’t have passed inspection when it was built in the 1960s, or when my in-laws bought it, 25 years ago), but that doesn’t make it any less of a pain in the ass, especially as the only access is through a doorway on the outside of the house.
Our house has a full basement, almost everything does in southern Ontario.
My father in law’s cottage on Georgian Bay (the NE corner of Lake Huron) is half basement and half crawl space as the Canadian Shield is exposed on parts, so some of the foundation does not go below the frost line. It rests directly on bedrock.
I have a full basement, but I’m on an edge of a housing development where the houses are built on a slab. It was after WWII, and they saved time on building by not having a basement. My house was the same vintage, but not part of the development.
I understand that termites are a problem in that area since the wood is only a few inches above the ground.