Between my AS and BS degrees I lived in my grand parents attic for a year. They were in their late 80s and I needed to get in a better financial place before continuing my education. So I drove them to doctor’s appointments and what not and watched a lot of cable. This was in the late 80s so no internet to be addicted to.
The only heat was via registers that opened to the rooms below and this was in Michigan. The walls and ceiling had minimal insulation and the floor was unpainted pine board.
I live in an attic right now with my two daughters. It’s insulated and divided in to two rooms with a small bathroom in between so it’s not so bad. It gets hotter up here but we both have window unit A/Cs.
Best part is when it rains it sounds really cool. Loud but cool.
I have never been happier and the rent is super cheap.
One summer in my early teens, my parents set up a bedroom in the basement which my sister or I sometimes used on hot nights; since the basement tended to flood in the winters, they moved the furniture out before the next flood and never bothered to move it back again. One other year, my sister and I had a bedroom made up in what had been the attic loft. It got oppressively warm so we didn’t stay there long.
Many years later in another house in another state, I had a basement bedroom in my parents’ house while I was in grad school.
Some years after that, when I finished school and first came to the DC area, I had a basement apartment in Silver Spring. There were large black crickets living inside the walls. I think I lived there about 4-5 months before finding a new place.
We have jillions of spider crickets in our Silver Spring basement at times. Cats like to eat the bodies, but not the legs. I’m a little surprised neither of our teenage sons has ever asked to moved down there, but they do have their own rooms upstairs. I lived in an apartment that was partly underground in grad school. My bedroom window was right at ground level, and one night I woke up to see a possum looking into my window.
My childhood home was a 1 1/2 story. My bedroom was basically a converted attic.
When I was a teen, I moved my bed to the basement for some reason for a few months.
Now my allergies flare up in basements, so I don’t want to live in one.
I lived in an attic room on Nantucket for a while and it was fine, but there did seem to be a lot of stairs.
My girlfriend lived in a basement in Queens and I spent some weeks there. In the hot summertime it was pleasantly cool, but there wasn’t much natural light. For some reason there was always a faint smell of gas that never got explained or fixed, and that’s the main thing I think about when I remember it.
Now I have a whole house plus a barn, a yard, a driveway, et cetera, so I’m spoiled. But both those places were better than typical apartments.
Technically I lived in the basement for my entire childhood up til college, because all the bedrooms were in the basement. Then for a year after grad school I lived with my future wife in my future father-in-law’s basement. The plus was that he charged us $200 a month. The minus was that we were living in my future father-in-law’s basement (with my future sister-in-law also living upstairs). Intimate moments could become … awkward … if somebody wandered down to do their laundry.
When I was in high school my mom and I finished 2/3rds of the attic for my new bedroom so my brother could have mine (his original bedroom had been tiny). I liked it quite a lot, though it probably helps that I’ve always liked rooms warmer than most people do.
The prior owner of my house converted most of the attic into a spacious master suite. I live there now. Does that count? I own the house, and have first choice of rooms, so I don’t feel like it’s a hardship.
It does get a little warm sometimes, but it’s insulated, and not too bad. It has its own heat zone, so it never gets too cold.
My neighbors’ house had the attic converted to a large bedroom with bathroom. The boy lived in it, the parents and daughter in typical bedrooms on the first floor. I was a bit envious, even if it took stairs to get there.
Doing work study during college, I rented a few rooms. One I stayed in was a front office type room, with the door being a set of metal doors like on closets. I hung a sheet inside for privacy. No lock on door, but it never was an issue.
When my sister was in college, she stayed in an actual garage loft apartment. She needed a place for her dog and her cat. It was a country home a bit of a drive from campus, but it worked for her.
Before my mom bought a house when I was 10, I lived in a few apartments. The first one was a “regular apartment” from birth until 5. After that things were less stable for a few years and we lived in both a garage apartment and later an attic apartment in houses of “little old ladies.”
When I was a teenager I lived with my aunt and uncle, and one of my cousins moved into the basement. He lived there on and off the next 5-6 years.
When I was 19-21, I shared an apartment with my GF. We both agreed to transfer schools and move to a more metropolitan area a couple hours away. We found that we could not afford to continue to live together (which was for the best). She moved in with 3 of her girlfriends who shared a house, and she lived in the bedroom in the basement. I lived with one of my other relatives during the last year of our relationship, but I spent much of the time in my GF’s basement room and living area.
When I was in my mid 20s, I rented the basement from my good friend and his future wife when they bought a big house. We built a bedroom down there and fixed up the rest, which included an office, game/party area, and fitness center.
Now, in my house, I spend most of my time in the basement. Because I work in my basement and it’s the least hectic and most comfortable place to hangout in a house full of kids, women, and pets.
When I was a kid my room was in the semi-finished attic. Hot as Hell all summer and basically an icebox during the winter. Not that the rest of the house was tons better. The main “bad part” to me always was negotiating the stairs at night to get to the bathroom. There was no rail and the walls were made of this odd sheetrock that had a surface rougher than a bastard file or heavy rasp. I lost more skin on those walls than I care to admit and had to wear long sleeves sometimes to basically cover up the blood. The only plus was it got me out of the usual routes my mother followed about the house.
And this was in our “good house” once we had “some money”. The places before that I prefer not to remember at all ------ and I didn’t live in the attic there.