My mother said "that’s not a basement, that’s a cellar.’
I voted yes on the poll, because I assumed the question covers both senses; but yes – fieldstone walls, steep entry stairs, dirt floor now covered with gravel, I can walk around down there upright without ducking but many people can’t – it’s about 6’ from floor to beams plus which the beams now in some places have plumbing or heating pipes attached beneath them. Also damp, though no sump pump is needed – any water that comes in the uphill side just goes out the downhill side; there’s a drain that’s now tied into the field tile system.
Late 1800’s house (in upstate NY, as you can see if you click on my avatar.) While when it was first built neither the furnace nor plumbing was an issue, food storage would have been considerably more of an issue than it is now (though I do still store potatoes and fruit down there in the winter.) – a portion of the house (which aside from back porch was all built at the same time) has only a crawl space under it, so I’m not sure basements were considered essential because of the foundation. But it occurs to me that there are the remains of a woodburning furnace down there; I think it’s not as old as the house, which certainly originally had multiple stoves in the living quarters, but I might be wrong.
ETA: that “crawl space” area isn’t even really a crawl space, unless you’re a cat. At most points there’s only a few inches of height.
Our current basement (in a 101-year-old house) is small, unfinished, wonderfully dry, and cool in winter making it highly suitable for dormant plant storage.
There’s also an extensive crawl space network, above which Pluto’s corral sits. He occasionally paws at the floor over the crawl space as if there is something down there, sort of like the dog in *The Amityville Horror". We accept that there may be unseen occupants. So far there have been no repercussions.
I’m in western Canada and houses without basements are rare. There were a number of “wartime” houses built for returning service men following WW2 that were slab houses but other than that it’s most uncommon. I’ve never lived in a house without a basement and as I type this I’m watching TV in my basement “man cave”. There’s a great room where I have my TV, lots of storage, an area for the furnace/AC & on demand water heaters, 3 pc bathroom and a spare bedroom that was out daughter’s when she was still at home.
This reminds me of my grandmother’s house in Columbus OH that I last saw over 60 years ago, so this is a fairly vague memory. I do remember the door and stairs leading to the cellar (and she called it that) were narrow and steep and dark. Very creepy to a non-basement having kid. I always had her house in my mind as a Victorian, but thinking about it, it was more likely a Foursquare. It was taken by eminent domain when a highway went through. So, both my grandmothers had houses demolished for roads (my paternal grandmother’s house was demolished for the 405).
Here in NE Minnesota most people have basements. Our basement is unfinished - meaning I don’t have a family room, etc. down there. The washer, dryer, furnace and water heater are all down there. The grandkids’ toys are down there. We have tons of storage down there too. Storage for stuff, most of the stuff is stuff we don’t use.
I have noticed that a lot of the homes being built in developments around here are being built on slabs with in-floor heating. I’m not that familiar with it but I wonder how much of a sh$% show it is to repair if something goes wrong.
I don’t have one, and as noted, they’re not very common in the UK. There are a few houses around my neighbourhood that have them, these tend to be larger Victorian properties, where the basement was intended for use by the servants, and there’s usually a staircase leading down from street level. You can see these on this streetview - most of these basements are now kitchens or have been converted into separate flats.
My previous home had a basement - again, a large Victorian home. I think I’ve watched too many horror films as I found it very creepy.
Minneapolis suburb, post-WWII house, full basement. It is not counted as livable space as no egress window. One half consists of furnace room / laundry room / storage. The other half is carpeted and half-assed insulated. It has been used as a family room, as an office, and for a while it was one nephew’s bedroom. Now it’s all storage, pending spring purge.
I have never lived in a house without a basement. I did look at a slab house (built 1952ish), and it was just so different. The lack of storage due to having so much space taken up by a furnace and water heater was the deal breaker for me. In retrospect, that was a good idea as it turned out there was a large crack in the slab and it would’ve cost a pretty penny to repair.
I remember when my dad’s stepmother died and we went to her house in LaCrosse, WI. Access to the basement was through a panel in the kitchen floor. There were permanent stairs that led down to a large room with a dirt floor. I remember shelving with canned goods - both store cans and home canning, a couple of bare lightbulbs for illumination, and a row of crocks 3/4 buried into the earth, full of way over-fermented sauerkraut. Forty years later my gag reflex kicks in at the smell of the stuff.
Yes. My house (in Nashville, Tennessee, USA) has a walkout basement. 1200 square feet on the main floor, and 600 square feet in the basement has been completed as a large den and bedroom. No bathroom down here, but it would be nice to have one. I have an eight-foot sliding-glass door out to the patio and back yard – that lets a lot of light in, when it is sunny outside. The rest of the basement (the remaining 600 square feet) is a one-car garage with lots of storage, and a “laundry” area.
It is a nice set-up. I have my television, a couch, love-seat, and easy chair in one section of the big “family room”. The other section has a lot of shelves and a desk. This is my home office that I set up after I started working from home due to the covid-virus. That is where I am right now, typing out this reply!
We have a walk-out basement; I think virtually every house in our neighborhood has some sort of basement, walk-out or otherwise. I’m in Missouri. Strangely enough, when I lived in Indiana when I was growing up, we didn’t have a basement. Everytime a tornado would come through the neighborhood (which was often - we lived in the middle of a corn field in tornado alley - we’d run to the neighbors’ house to hide in their basement or climb into the bathtub and shut the bathroom door.
Anyway, I love my basement now - I got my mom’s old rec room furniture, and I can hang out there by myself for hours. It’s lovely and quiet and for the longest time there was nothing to sit on downstairs, so people forget I can hide down there.
What do you mean by this? Is it a split level home with living space below the ‘first floor’, or just that it’s built on a slope with some portion of an unfinished basement open at the lower end of the slope?
I’m sure there a lot of variations between the extremes too. Our house in NY was a raised ranch, the lower level had a finished basement and garage. Obviously you could walk out the garage, but no other part of the basement level was at ground level to put a door in.
Its this, but not neccessarily unfinished . Mine is very much finished. You walk right out into the yard at the bottom of a gully that leads to a creek. Very common in Michigan. The front if the house is at street level.
Yes, and I like it overall. It’s 4 rooms, 3 are finished in 70’s style with a bar, wood paneling, and linoleum floors. And one utility room with bare concrete floors and unfinished walls. The utility room has the air handler, well expansion tank, and water heater, things like that.
But with all the extra rain we’ve had the last few years the drain in my outdoor stairwell hasn’t been able to cope and minorly flooded the basement a few times. So I’ve covered the outdoor basement steps temporarily to cope with that issue.
Yup, this exactly. My house is technically a ranch, so virtually all our living (sleeping, eating, hanging out) occurs on the main floor. But the house is built on a hill, making the lower floor, most of which is dug into the side of the hill, our basement. One section of it is not finished and makes up the storeroom with a concrete floor and walls. The part that isn’t the storeroom is finished and has two French doors that exit to the back patio & yard.
No, I am in California where basements are incredibly uncommon. My house, like many in the area, is built on a concrete slab foundation, so there isn’t even a crawl space underneath.
And it had one for the same reason most of the houses I’ve lived in had basements: they were on a hillside with the rear of the house being several feet downhill from the side that fronted on the street.
Ages 0-18: lived in 3 houses, all of which had basements. (Los Angeles, MD and VA suburbs of DC)
Ages 40–present: owned 2 houses, both of which had basements (Bristol, VA; MD exurb of DC)
Ages 18-40: lived mostly in dorms and apartments. Rented a house for 2 years in Columbia, SC that didn’t have a basement.
That’s probably about the only reason a house around here would have a basement. Although thinking about it more, since others have mentioned basements being necessary in cold climates maybe they are more common up in the High Sierras. I honestly wouldn’t know, since I’ve never had a house up there. But maybe I should generalize about the entire state, and limit my comment to the warm parts.
ETA: Come to think of it, every single building I’ve lived in as an adult has had a slab foundation, including apartment buildings (I always lived in ground floor apartments).
The house I grew up in in North Carolina had a crawl space under the original structure, but when my parents built an addition they included a basement storage room/workshop underneath it. And the reason was once again because the land sloped away from the house where the addition was, so it was very little extra expense to just put a basement under it. It was only accessible from the outside; there were no stairs from the main floor to the basement.
As a resident of the northern climes, I’ve never even seen a house without a basement, other than seasonal country cottages. The former house had a fully finished basement, in the current one it’s partially finished (one large room completely finished, the rest with roughed-in walls and electrical). I don’t particularly need the extra living space, but I can’t imagine where I’d store the vast quantity of junk and old furniture that I seem to constantly accumulate. There are literally dozens of large moving boxes. some that have literally never been opened since the last move, and a few that haven’t been opened since two moves and nearly 20 years ago! I know, I’m a pack-rat. And this is despite, during my last move, filling a large full-size dumpster to completely overflowing! There was so much stuff that it had to be stacked carefully so as not to waste any dumpster space. In the end it looked like a densely packed moving van! A lot of it was no doubt good saleable stuff, but it would have taken more time and effort than I had.