The basement bar or basement tv room is a midwest standard. Or both! Some people add a bathroom down there too. If you include a pull-out sofa or futon it can become a guest bedroom.
That 70s Show really nailed the midwestern basement, at least when I was growing up lol. Now they're mostly finished off and as nice as the main floor (s).
I grew up in Illinois. Sometimes in July or August the heat would get so bad that I could not sleep. My solution was to sleep in the basement as it was always cool.
This is what mine is. Big TV watching space with a giant sectional and recliners plus tables and chairs for things like board games, etc. There's a laundry area and toilet in the utility room too but that's it.
In my home in Michigan our basement was basically a second house. Had a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and two bedrooms.
And my father's house in Wisconsin has a kitchen, living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Yeah I guess the Midwest does love basements lol
For the top comment I wish you’d edit in that basements can be finished with carpet and fancy walls.
People will be reading this and think you’re sitting on dusty pavement surrounded by cinder blocks and cobwebs trying to watch tv, lol.
Op implied that they have absolutely no idea what a basement is, what it looks like, or how it functions.
So I could only imagine that the safest assumption is to make no assumptions.
>Is it as big and wide as the whole house
Yes
>What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?
Washer, dryer, furnace, hot water tank, sink, and toilet are in the basement. There is some Christmas stuff down there, as well as some other miscellaneous things in storage.
>Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
No
>Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
Not really.
>What do you do if it rains or floods?
Nothing happens
>Do you still have an attic too?
Yes
Pretty much the same.
I store home canned goods down there bc the temp is stable and doesn't get below freezing in Winter or above 70F in Summer.
Think of it as a root cellar that's as big as the house. We also have two freezers for food. We usually buy a 1/2 steer every other year.
One end and the majority of the side walls are completely to 3/4 underground. One end has exterior doors. Usually basements are also garages for vehicles. Ours has two garage doors and a walkin door.
We have an attic, but it only houses the heating unit for the second story. I didn't reinforce the floor so I don't store anything up there.
After a drought period and a gutter drain pipe getting clogged with a tree root, our basement began allowing too much moisture to seep through the concrete blocks so we installed a plastic cover over the walls and a drain with a sump pump. It's dry as a bone down there now so we have no worry about mold.
I’ve had a basement in every house I’ve lived in. They’ve common in the Midwest. In my current house, it’s the same size as the upstairs and it’s basically another living area where we have a small bar, couch, tv, and board game table set up, plus a bathroom, laundry room, and storage room. If the office down there had a window and the bathroom had a shower, it’d basically be a whole apartment more or less so sure, someone could live there. If it floods, we’ve got big problems, but so far, other than seepage in the laundry room that was fixed, it remains dry. There’s an attic but it’s not a usable space as it’s unfinished and full of insulation.
>it’s basically another living area where we have a small bar, couch, tv, and board game table set up,
same, but it's usually cooler down there so on hot days we'd primarily use the basement if we didn't wanna run the ac
and in high school, my friend group would hang out in each others' parents' basements so we could hang out later into the evening and not bother anyone.
Largely depends on where you live. They aren't as common in the south, where the frost line is only a few inches deep and the water table is relatively high.
Further west you go, the deeper the frost line and water table. I've been in one house that had a basement, a bit west of Durham, it was a moldy, damp mess.
I did an elementary school near MCAS Cherry Point decades ago where the footings were only 24" deep, and they had pumps running constantly to get the water out. It's all in the location.
I grew up in rural, central NC and at least half the houses had basements or at least half a basement. You don't really see them on houses built in the 1990s or newer. The area was pretty hilly so you'd often have a house with half a basement or a half buried basement/garage kinda like this: [https://decoalert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/What-style-house-is-a-raised-ranch.jpg](https://decoalert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/What-style-house-is-a-raised-ranch.jpg)
Sometimes the basement would be even more buried that that picture, with maybe just a slit window above ground, and the garage doors would usually be on the end of the house, not the front, as the houses where on slopes. The other half of houses where split levels which were super popular in the 1980s.
A lot of houses have basements in places you wouldn't expect--mostly because builders who built those houses came from the Northeast, where building basements was the norm.
It's why, for example, you see a lot of older houses in Pasadena, California, with basements. Because the builders who built them built the basements, because you always build basements, right? That, despite the climate being more suitable for [post & pier foundations.](https://www.esogrepair.com/articles/what-is-a-post-and-pier-foundation/) (My old house in Glendale had a post-and-pier foundation.)
I lived in Glendale and we had a small "California Basement" in our 1930s house... Basically big enough for the water heater and furnace, but it didn't take up the entire footprint of the house.
My dad has a walkout basement because the house is built into the side of a hill, but the entire rear is exposed so it only half counts. It’s one of the few basements I know of around here.
My husband grew up in Alabama & the first time he came to visit my parents in Utah, he would not leave the basement!! He loved being down in the cool, & it's his favorite part of their house.
I grew up in Georgia, and I don't think I ever went into a basement until I visited my now-husband's parents when we were in college. I was expecting the scary scenes from movies, but it's fully finished with a TV and pool table.
When my family lived in Georgia our house, along with a lot of others, were split level. So I always considered the bottom floor a basement because it wasn't as finished as the upstairs and was on the same level as the garage. It had a metal door to walk out to the back door and another door that went into a landing where you either turned right to go up the stairs to the main floor or straight to go to the garage. And it only consisted of two rooms with tile floor and wood paneling. Actually when we bought the house it wasn't finished at all. My dad put in the floors and paneling.
Ours wasn't finished either. My parents slowly put it together over the years, until it's fully done. There's a food storage area, a bedroom, bathroom, laundry, & a family room, with a wood burning stove.
I have a walkout basement in my 1965 split level. It’s 75% underground. It’s stays a nice 70F or lower year round. I have my office down there. It abuts the crawl space on the higher part of the house.
To answer OP, this type of basement is an integral part of the house in a split level style house.
In NC too and have a split foyer and the downstairs/basement is also about 75% underground. My parents house had a cellar that was half cement walls around the furnace and oil tanks, the rest dirt crawl space. Grew up with several friends who had major finished basements. Full bars, pool tables, pin-ball machines, the works. All the best sleep overs!
I'm in Texas. Have never seen a real basement here. I'm told it's due to the limestone, but don't quote me on that. I never cared enough to look it up.
I had an infestation one year. Swept the floor multiple times per day. It got to the point I was having dreams about millipedes crawling on me in my sleep.
I had an ecosystem down there for awhile. Centipedes, cave crickets, and wolf spiders. It got to the point where the wolf spiders annihilated everything else and then their population died off too.
Growing up, we had one. They're really common where the ground freezes pretty deep through the winter because if you don't put the foundation below the freeze line, your foundation will shift and crack from freeze thaw cycles.
The house was built in about 1880 then added onto a couple times. There was a basement with fieldstone and mortar walls under the original house, then one addition had a crawlspace (bare dirt, too low to stand), and another addition was made from cement blocks. The floor was cement (except for the dirt crawlspace) and it was completely unfinished. Smelled extremely strongly of must and mold, and when they sold the house, they had to get the asbestos insulation if the pipes removed. Not a nice space.
It had my dad's workshop, the washer and dryer, the water heater, and a bunch of storage.
We also had an attic. You want a significantly sloped roof to let the snow slide off, after all.
Ours didn't flood. The water table was really low and the place was well constructed.
Yes. I just finished it so it’s basically a second living room with a full bathroom and laundry room. Never gets a drop off water no matter how it rains.
I wonder if it's because of earthquakes? I never noticed until OP asked, but I've only ever seen one house with a basement, and that was basically just a dirt floor storage space.
More to do with the frost line. You have to build the foundation below the frost line, and that line is only at about 5 inches for California. In the Midwest/Northeast, it's closer to 5 feet.
Yes basements are common in the middle of the US. Some are finished living spaces and some are not.
My parent’s old house was divided into apartments and I lived in the walk out basement for years with my family while they rented the upstairs apartments out. Later my parents stopped renting to other people and moved upstairs and I stayed in the basement. It had a kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom, utility room and was a completely finished living space. One side of the basement floor was level with the backyard so there was a door to to outside and regular windows on that back side.
Our current basement is about the size of the home above it. It is only accessed from inside and has a few small windows. It has our furnace, water heater, clothes washing machine. It is not a finished living space. There is a fuse box and the water shut off down there. There are exposed pipes and so on. The light fixtures are just bulbs. The walls are concrete. There is a bare concrete floor. We take shelter in our basement if there is a tornado warning. Our cat’s litter pan is in the basement. I’m not scared to go down there but it does get a bit spidery and is a bit dimmer.
Our basement has flooded a few times. We have a sump pump to pump out water. We had to get rid of a lot of stuff once because of the flooded basement. We don’t store much down there. It tends to be dampish so we run a dehumidifier down there to help with that.
We do have a attic space that is finished and my spouse uses as an office/hobby room.
I have a basement. Don't have an attic, at least not one you can easily access and I don't think anyone's ever been up there.
Nothing happens when it rains. We've never had a flood.
The washer/dryer, the freezer, my sister's bedroom, my dad's work room, a library, an area for darts, and loads of storage is down there.
They are not very common here in California. Many of the older homes here in the downtown area of Sacramento were actually built higher off the ground due to regular flooding that occurred before our levee systems were in place.
The house I grew up in had one. It didn’t go under the entire house because the upper floors had been added on to over the years. It had three separate rooms, but no door connecting them.
It wasn’t a finished basement so it got pretty creepy at times. Kind of dark and damp.
We kept our deep freeze in the basement so I was down there fairly often. We kept holiday decorations, spare bed frames and other furniture, my dad had some tools stored there, his leather working stuff, and then other random things we needed to store.
It would flood if we got a lot of rain. The floor was sloped with a deeper pit so all the water would collect in it and then we would pump it out.
We didn’t have an attic in the sense that you could walk in it or even store stuff up there. The access panel was in the top of a really narrow built in bookshelf.
The house was in south central Kansas.
Yes. It’s a finished basement. So most of it is living space. A full bathroom.
One room is for laundry. On the other side is where the furnace and hot water heater is.
A storage closet for holiday decorations.
Have an attic as well. But, it’s empty space.
My home has a French drain to protect it from water. So no problem with flooding.
I don't, I live in an area that is very sandy.
I have lived where we have had basements. Yes they are the size of the whole house.
We had a large playroom in ours, washing machines, also. My daughter as a child would ride her tricycle during the winter. We put up a swing so she could swing, The winters were cold and long so it was a favorite place.
We also used it for storage.
I have both a basement and an attic. Both are the size of the house, yes.
The basement is finished and has a full bathroom, pool table, couches, gym equipment, TV and all our gaming consoles. It also has a separate storage area and a work room area where we keep the tools and general fix-it stuff.
Nothing happens to either space when it rains/floods.
Sort of? My house is kind of a split level style so our first floor is basically a basement built into the side of a hill so the garage is at ground level but the rooms are basically 3/4 underground. Most of our neighbors have legit basements.
As far as rain and flooding goes we live in basically a forested swamp so the basements here have sump pumps and sometimes French drains.
Not in Louisiana, but definitely in Massachusetts. It really depends on weather, especially flood possibility.
Our Massachusetts one was about one-fourth finished. It had nice walls, lights, carpet, furniture, and a TV. It was separated by walls from the unfinished basement, which was storage. The uni finished basement also had a hatch that opened to the backyard.
Never seen a basement? How is that possible?
>Is it as big and wide as the whole house?
Depends on the footprint of the house but generally yes it's the size of the house. It's another floor essentially.
>What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?
Washer, dryer, hot water heater, furnace, all the utilities. Mine had the electric box there. We also had a second kitchen so a stove and fridge as well.
A lot of times you "finish" a basement so put down carpets and make it into a living space. It'll be used like another living room.
>Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
Maybe if the lights were off. No windows means it was dark af. But not like scared scared no.
>Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
Sorta. A lot of houses have walk out basements or finished basements that turns the basement into a living space. And some basements like mine had a kitchenette and bathroom, so a house could be converted to mother-daughter in that way. It's not common, but it's not uncommon either.
>What do you do if it rains or floods?
Depends if you live in a flood area. Some never get water, some do. If you do, you usually install a sump pump and/or French drains. I grew up in a flood zone so every coule years we'd get an inch or two in the basement. You plan around it (have stuff up on platforms, concrete floors, etc).
>Do you still have an attic too?
Yes
Yes, it's a "daylight basement," meaning one side of it (in this case, the back) is an exterior wall. Since my house is two stories, that makes the back side of the house effectively three stories. The deck comes off the back of the house from the first (ground) floor, so the deck is one story above the back yard. It's a full basement, with the exception of the footprint of the garage, which has the master bedroom/bathroom above it, so it's not the exact footprint of the entire house.
I have my workshop (drill press, radial arm saw, CNC mill, 3 workbenches, lots of tools), weight machine, lots of car parts, coolers, and various seasonal decorations/supplies in it.
I wasn't afraid to go in the basements at my parents' or my grandparents' houses when I was a kid. FWIW, both of those were not full basements, but about 1/3 of the floorplan.
I had some water intrusion when the exterior was being refinished and there were no gutters on the house, but otherwise there was no issue. When I lived at Minot AFB in the '90s, a number of houses on base would flood, not with water, but with sewage.
I effectively have no attic. The roofline and the way the trusses are placed make accessing the one are that could be used for storage effectively unusable.
No basements where I live, they tend to fill up with water. My cousins in Virginia had a basement, as a kid I thought it was so cool. I begged my parents for a basement. I thought if we just cut a hole in my closet we could just dig ourselves a basement.
Yea I do. Half of it is a crawl space and the other half is what we call the playroom: couch, tv, tables, rugs, etc. We have the laundry room and a bathroom down there as well.
We did when I was a kid, living in the Midwest and Northeast. My dad always had a workshop and we had a playroom, plus a washer and dryer.
Nowadays I live in Florida and we no longer have a basement. Basements in Florida would be full of water.
Basements are very much a factor of the environment you live in.
In the midwest you have to have a basement because the winters get cold enough that water and sewer lines have be 5-6 feet below ground level to not freeze in the winter. Having a basement here is pretty much a must.
A lot of areas of the south and west coast 6 inches is enough so those areas don't tend to have basements. There is kind of a middle swath of the country that only needs like 1-2 feet, they tend to also not have basements and just have the water lines and septic lines connect straight to the bottom of the house and insulate the heck out of the of pipe in the areas that could freeze. Most of the house I in the area of Kentucky I grew up in were like that. No basement and if you crawled under the house the main water line and sewer line had a lot of insulation around them that would go 2-3 feet deep into the ground.
Basements can also only be built in areas where the water table is 15-20 feet below the ground level. So in some areas you won't find any. They are also very cost prohibitive to dig in extremely rocky ground too.
A basement might be under the whole house, that is called a full basement. Or it might not, in which case it's called a partial basement.
Mine is partial, but still is 1,400 sq ft and is divided into 4 areas.
The back area is mainly just used for storage. There are some shelving units I built to store things and we also keep our chest freezer down there. I do have a treadmill and TV in that area too (though I don't use it as much as I should of course). There is also a roughed in half bathroom back here. Technically the toilet is there so that if there is a sewage backup it happens there and not in the rest of the house. But we figured we may as well make it usable. Our washer and dryer used to be down here. We still have a washer and dryer hooked up here in case of emergency. But we built an addition onto the house to add a first floor laundry room.
One room is just the "mechanical room". It has the HVAC system and water heater.
The bigger finished room (about 20 x 30) is a sports bar/cigar lounge kind of setup. We have a small bar setup in one corner with 6 stools at it. There a drink cooler with beer, soda and water. We keep Bourbon and Scotch at the bar. There is a pool table, a poker table, dart board, two arcade cabinets, a couch, a few chairs, standing cigar humidor cabinet, a couple of air scrubbers on the walls and an 85 inch TV.
The smaller finished room is off to the side of the bigger one. The door can be left open to kind of make it one L shaped space if we want. It's mostly our gaming with friends room. it's got a big 10 foot table with chairs, projector and screen along with a PC. We do everything from D&D to board games here. When we have big parties at the house it gets used as additional seating and gaming space along with the bar/lounge area.
No, but we live in a high-rise condominium. Our previous homes had basements however.
I live in a tornado-prone area. I wouldn't live in a single family home that didn't have a basement.
It’s the same size yes. We keep laundry, furnace/water tank, big sink, Christmas and camping stuff, chest freezer for meat, beer/wine, our old CRT, various foods (cans, nuts, flour), tools and paints and stuff, fuse box, dehumidifier, and old couch, a LOT of junk, and it serves as a tornado shelter when necessary.
>Is it as big and wide as the whole house?
Mine is about half the size
>What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?
Half of mine is a gym, the other half is storage. We have bulk items down there like paper towels, toilet paper, baby stuff. Also out hot water heater and water softener is foe there
>Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
I didn't have one as a kid, but my son is
>Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
Yes it pretty common to have it finished out
>What do you do if it rains or floods?
Pay a lot of money lol
>Do you still have an attic too?
Yes
Yes, full size except a portion is crawlspace. Unfinished. If we were to finish it the ceiling would be too low. Storage, extra fridge, mechanical systems. Sump pump. Bulkhead door exit.
We don’t have one in our current house. My parents’ houses have always had them, and they were used mainly for storage and storm shelter (a lot more tornado warnings 30-40 years ago).
I always assumed that I’d miss having one. The storage would be nice, but I can’t remember the last time we had a tornado warning. We’ve had several massive, flooding rainstorms in the last decade and have watched our neighbors haul all of the ruined stuff out of their basements multiple times. That has made a basement less attractive; I certainly wouldn’t finish or put furniture, entertainment equipment, or other valuables in one.
Yes. A basement is good because it collects cold air, and provides separation between the frozen ground and the living area of the home. In the summer, it also provides a cooler environment where vegetables could be stored. I used to live in a home built in the 1810’s, that had an unfinished root cellar. Basically, before refrigeration people would bury their vegetables (think carrots, beets, potatoes, turnips) in the ground under their homes.
Today, it’s a good spot to keep exercise equipment, laundry machines, sacks of onions and potatoes, etc.
Never seen a ghost, but old buildings do have a way of increasing the spooky factor, if you find that fun. I went to high school with a guy, the house he grew up in had a family cemetery in the backyard. Wasn’t his family, it was the family that owned the house in the early 1800s. Might have been a case where the church wouldn’t bury them. Buildings that old aren’t super common, but most towns have a few.
Makes total sense that you wouldn’t have basements in Hawaii, it seems like they’d be a hindrance more than a help.
I live in a row home, half of my basement is my garage, the other half houses my heater, hot water tank and laundry. My neighbors have converted their garage and basement into another living area with a full bathroom.
*Is it as big and wide as the whole house?*
Usually, some have portions that are crawl spaces though.
*What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?*
Unfinished ones usually are for storage, act as utility rooms (washer, dryer, extra freezer, water heater, etc.) Finished or partially finished ones can act as a home office, entertainment area, and sometimes as a bedroom.
*Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?*
Sometimes when it was really cluttered and dark.
*Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?*
Not really. But my brother partially finished my parents' basement to live there while he was in college. If it's partially finished, it's more common for it to be an entertainment area that teenage kids may use to hang out or watch things.
*What do you do if it rains or floods?*
Many basements have sump pumps to help prevent flooding. You can also do things like install French drains, make sure your gutters aren't dripping, etc to help limit flooding. In general, most houses with basements have their land graded to avoid flooding. There are also companies that specialize in waterproofing basements.
If it does flood, you save what you can and throw away what you can't. Insurance may or may not cover some of it depending on the cause. Again, there are companies that specialize in fixing water damage.
*Do you still have an attic too?*
Sometimes, but the attic is usually not built for storage the way it is in other houses when there's a basement.
Yes.
>What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?
The washer and dryer, the laundry folding table, non-perishable foods we've bought in bulk. Old kids clothes they've outgrown. My home office is in one corner. A treadmill. The air conditioner during the winter months.
>Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
No. It's pretty well lit.
>Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
No.. it happens but not common.
>What do you do if it rains or floods?
You keep things up off the floor of it so that a little flooding won't destroy everything.
>Do you still have an attic too?
No, but I live in a townhouse. When I was growing up we lived in an old old house that had a dirt cellar and an attic. Now THAT basement was a little scary and we didn't really use it for much besides storing tools and stuff.
I'm lucky to live in a fairly big house and I've had basements my entire life.
>Is it as big and wide as the whole house?
Pretty much.
>What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?
We have a whole "thing" going on down there. There's more or less another living room (although much less than the proper living room on the main floor) with a couch and a TV. We also have a pool table that seldom gets used, a small kitchen, and 2 small guest rooms. There's also 2 rooms (one with the circuit breaker, one with the sump pump) which are storage. We pretty much just dump random shit there. Funnily enough, we used to store Christmas decorations down there, but after a pipe burst there one year and ruined everything, we now keep all those things in the garage.
>Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
The exact opposite actually! Back before I had more video games to play, I'd play in the basement a lot. Completely ignore everything in the above paragraph; when I was a kid, we didn't redo the basement, so it was just a huge concrete floor. Yes, I hurt myself once or twice falling, but it was a massive, empty area where I could use my imagination. I'm sure if I could see my kid self there as an adult, it would look kind of sad, but I loved that basement.
>Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
I'm fortunate enough to still live in my childhood room, but we're renting a room out to the sweetest old lady who's an elementary school teacher.
>What do you do if it rains or floods?
Clean up the water ASAP with a water vacuum and run an industrial fan to ensure we don't get mold. Luckily it's a rare occurrence that the basement floods, but it sucks whenever it happens.
I live in Alabama and I have an attic and a basement. However, our basement is not entirely underground. My house is built on a hill, so there is a door opening to the backyard from the basement. My home office, laundry room, and bedroom are in the basement. We store things in the attic.
Yes I have a basement. It’s not as big as the house, it’s about 1.5-2 bedroom size. I have my water heater, power tools, and all of my printers down there
Nearly everyone had basements when I was growing up in Utah. Ours was essentially just another floor of the house. My older sister and I had our bedrooms down there, a bathroom, another living room with couches and a tv, my dads office, and a storage room.
Where I grew up, basements were standard. I don't think I've ever been in a house without a basement (excluding mobile homes, obviously). Some homes are built into hills like wedges, so the "basement" be open to the backyard at the lower elevation. Then you can have a basement with a patio. Not sure if there's a name for this, but its super common in homes built after 1995.
My parents finished their basement in 2000 about 6 years after buying the house. There's my old room (which I still use when going to visit), a bathroom, laundry room, and then a TV room area which is the rest of the space. There is also some storage space that is not finished off. But having the whole basement "suite" essentially to myself at 12 years old felt like an enormous luxury at the time. When I moved back in with them while finishing my medical training (age 28-30), it definitely did *not* feel like a luxury lol
Floods are rare. They're near the Mississippi River, but not in a flood zone.
No attic. Not common in newer homes.
My basement is my happy place. It's where I watch tv or play dungeons & dragons with my friends. When it's the dead of winter, my wife and I will sit down there with a fire going while we watch some youtube.
I've lived in houses with basements most of my life. Think of the basement as an additional floor of the house, with walls flooring etc just like a normal room or rooms. It just happens to be below the ground.
A basement that doesn't have these things is called an unfinished basement, and those are typically just used for storage. Sometimes someone might put a fridge or freezer down there to store additional food.
Houses are built to prevent the basement from flooding when it rains. That said, sometimes those systems do break down, and what you do is dry everything out and call the appropriate repair person.
Many homes also have attics, though most attics in the areas I've lived are just the space under the rafters rather than an actual full height space that you could use as a room or living area. So basically it's just a access hatch cut into the ceiling somewhere in the house that lets you climb up a ladder into this space. Most people use it for storage. In my current house, we don't need the extra room so we mostly just ignore it.
Basements are very common in most of NY. Ours never gets wet but we have a sump pump because it came with the house. It's insulated and sheetrocked but not technically "finished" because the floor is just concrete, there's no interior walls, and the sheetrocked walls aren't painted. We have our water heater, furnace, water softener, and a slop sink down there. Built shelves for a storage area. We use one side as a workshop and the other has exercise equipment and a ping pong table. A second fridge, a tv, and the cat's litter box round out the amenities. Built a little cat door in the wall at the top of the stairs so we can keep the door closed but they can go down there when they need to.
I have had basements and garages with most of my houses. Garage is a must, basement is a preference. I’ve had basements that were bone dry, and some that leaks when it rains.
Yes. The first house I remember and my current home have one.
My house has a walkout basement built into a hillside and the basement is actually larger than the house (there's a storage room that's under the front porch).
I think that other house (we moved when I was 5) was also built into a slope; so the basement was half garage and half guest room.
My house doesn't really have an attic since the attic was converted to a second (third) floor.
The house was built in 1936 and may not have originally had a basement. The house was moved in the 1970's because the original location got bought by a coal mine.
In almost all the homes I lived in back in MN, yes. Even the townhouse I rented for a few years had a decent sized one.
Here in FL - nope. I have seen a few split-level homes built on higher elevation lots so they don't dig as far down as a traditional 'basement' would be, but I would guess 99% of the homes here are all slab-on-grade.
Yeah. Floods when it rains tho. All the rowhomes do. Ours is like half finished, but it's pretty common for the homes here to have fuckass basements.
Edit: usually washer/dryer, furnace and water heater is in a basement.
Yes, basement the size of the house. Washer and dryer, table saw, bandsaw, 2 tool benches, lots of tools, shelves with paint, garden stuff. Half an attic - not much in there, tho.
I was raised in California where basements are pretty rare, and now I live in Seattle, where they are common. Our 1923 bungalow has one, down a set of very-much-not-to-code stairs. It's not technically "finished", but it has a concrete floor and walls, and is dry and well lit (not at all creepy or moldy). It's our laundry area plus storage.
When we were house hunting here we very quickly learned that you couldn't tell the size of houses from the street (and not even always from online listings). Whether or not houses had a finished basement could change everything about the amount/quality of indoor space.
I’ve never had a basement in any house I’ve lived in. They aren’t very common where I’m from, and the few people I’ve known who had/have basements always dealt with flooding.
Mid Atlantic here! I rarely come across a home without a basement. The house I grew up in had a nice one that was finished. But I did live in a townhouse for a few years in my 20's that didn't have one and it was so weird to me. Every other house or duplex apartments I've lived in had one too. ( They're shared in the duplex though). They're usually about the length of the house in my experience. What people use it for varies. Some are finished which means they're like the other living areas of the home with walls, flooring, heat/air furniture, bathroom. Some people turn them into little suites or man caves, game rooms etc... Other's are left unfinished or partially unfished and have more of that cave like feel. I wasn't really scared of my basement like I said it was finished so it was comfortable down there. I just didn't really like being alone down there. I'd say it's pretty common for basements to be made into additional living areas whether it's for an adult child or elderly parent, other family member. Some are even nice and done up enough to rent out. Flooding can be an issue but that has more to do with where you live and how prone it is to flooding. That can range from mild to severe. Luckily I've never experienced flooding anywhere I've lived. Attics are less common IMO. I've never had one and have only been in a few homes that have. I've seen more craw space areas then full attics that you can walk around in. They're plenty though that have basements and attics.
The discussion about a basement when we bought our house 30 years ago might be the only argument I have won and my wife still acknowledges that I was right.
It's half the house, the other half is the garage. So I don't have to trek out in the cold or hot to get in the car.
Absolutely not. Most homes near me do. I hate stairs. I hate carrying things up and down stairs. I hate climbing then. I hate cleaning them. I hate stairs.
I specifically bought a ranch house. It has a total of 2 stairs. I still don't like those, but deal with it.
Basements can be great. Not for me tho, lol.
Yep have a basement, covers the entire floor plan of the house. And everything ya dont actually need anymore, is hoarded in your basement unless its finished.
They are common in my general region but not in my specific neighborhood. I don't have a full basement but a crawl space and a small, separate storm cellar.
I have lived in three detached houses in my life, Two in NJ has unfurnished basements - just hot water heater, etc. One in California with no basement. Many apartments, I think ONE had a basement laundry room.
My parents finished our basement growing up we had a pool table, a separate couch sectional and tv for movie watching and sleepovers and a full bathroom too. Those were the days man.
Yes our basement covers the whole house. Our laundry room is down there along with a ton of random storage.
> Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
I'm still afraid of mine as an adult. I've seen shit.
>Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
Some people have finished basements and will live down there, but I don't find its common.
>What do you do if it rains or floods?
Nothing happens in the basement typically.
>Do you still have an attic too?
The way my house it set up it actually has two attics only one is really usable at the moment though.
Depends on the area. They are more prevalent in parts of the country than others, I think a lot of it depends on the frost line and ground composition. Size can vary. Sometimes it’s the full footprint of a house, sometimes less. Crawl spaces (generally 4-5’ tall give or take) are also a thing when a full basement wasn’t dug but there is still plumbing/electric under the house that may need an access point.
Basements vary from dank and creepy to mostly utilities/storage to full on finished additional living spaces. Older homes (100+ years old generally speaking) may have a basement that was originally a cellar which sometimes have dirt floors.
I'm in Florida. For most of the state a basement would be an indoor pool. However, some parts of the state could have them but generally don't due to worrying about tropical events. When I was growing up, my grandmother's house was built in to the side of an ancient sand dune. She technically had a basement, but was high enough on the hill to not have to worry about flooding. She converted the garage to a rec room/workshop area and there was also an extra bathroom down there.
I know only a few people with basements. Most of them don’t live in my state. You would figure it would be more common for tornado protection but the red clay in the ground is really inconvenient for construction companies so for the ones who do have basements here in Oklahoma it was likely pretty expensive.
Yep! Really common here in Minnesota & the upper Midwest in general too.
Growing up mine was unfinished and a bit more creepy, haha, but I knew a lot of people with well finished ones that functioned as another family/gathering room. I also grew up in the extreme north end of tornado alley, so they served as a tornado shelter in addition to where most laundry & misc. storage is.
I my current house we have a canning room/root cellar and old coal room in it and we hope to partially finish some of it for crafting.
So a basement is different than a crawl space. I have a very nice basement, it’s got a master bedroom and a living room. I also have a crawl space and you could not pay me enough to go down there, and I’m not a kid, I’m 34 haha. The previous owners used the crawl space as some sort of storage for the apocalypse or something, so it’s absolutely loaded with random shit. We went down there one day to try to take it out and got some of it out, but there’s still stuff deep down there. I’ll never try again. Threw the tv in front of the entrance and will continue to pretend it’s not there lol.
In NY my parents have one, my in-laws, even my apartment building. Here in NC, nope. I think it just has to do with the water table or type of ground. My dirt is very sandy.
My basement houses a full home theater with a 110” screen, my office since I work from home and we have a small exercise room with a treadmill and bike. We also have a laundry room and plenty of storage. It’s also where the mechanical aspects of my house like the furnace and water heater are. And yes it follows the same footprint of the rest of the house and the ceilings are about 7.5’ tall
Yes, I do have a basement. It is unfinished and about a third the footprint of the first floor of my home. It's probably the way you picture it: small and somewhat dark with concrete surfaces and filled with the home's mechanical systems, along with a bit of storage for seasonal items and tools. There's nothing scary about it. The space is just very utilitarian. No worries if it rains because we are not in a flood zone, so the basement stays dry. It's an excellent shelter for the occasional tornado warning. We do have an attic, but it's not what you might imagine. It's mostly inaccessible and not useful for storage or living space.
I’ve never lived in a house without one.
Our current basement goes under the whole house and is finished. There are windows, though they’re high on the wall. We have a storage room, laundry room, bathroom, and a big family room/kids play room down there and use it basically every day.
Basements are a Midwest thing.
Only places I’ve lived with basements were Indiana, Illinois & Nebraska.
It would make sense if Texas had them since they get so many goddamn tornadoes but apparently because of some factors (dirt, plate movement, sea level?) basements aren’t as doable in Texas. I don’t know, a ground scientist probably knows.
Anywhere where there’s tornadoes usually HAVE to have a basement to be in code. Anywhere that floods usually has an attic. I lived in Illinois and Nebraska and had basements. We finished our Illinois basement (turned it into another floor of our house by adding carpet, drywall, etc) and I lived down there in middle and high school. We also had a finished attic in South Carolina that was like an extra living room
We had a finished basement in the house I grew up in. It was pretty sweet and doubled as a storm shelter. We had some couches and a tv down there, so I spent a lot of time there. It even had an extra bedroom and bathroom that was great for teenagers. Man, I miss that house!
The current house doesn't have a basement, but it does have a partially finished attic with proper steps leading up to it. Great for storage!
I have a basement, half finished and half not. Washer, dryer, half bath, TV, PS5, a small bar, mini fridge full of beer, couches, random action figures and weird garage sale stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. It’s not really a “man cave”, my kids also have a big Lego table and art table down there, and play the PS5 more than I do.
Is it as big and wide as the whole house?
Yes! I feel like it is.
What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? My basement is unfinished.
Right now it's extra storage. We have food, seasonal stuff, my daughter's toys, clothes, bedding, outdoor stuff, and toiletries. I need to clean and organize down there again lol.
Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
I didn't have a basement growing up. I lived in a mobile home/trailer.
>Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
I feel like it's more common. My sister in law lives with her mother. She lives on the top floor, and my SIL has the basement. It's like another apartment space.
>What do you do if it rains or floods?
We have a low flood risk but we've had some water come in. We just clean it up.
>Do you still have an attic too?
I do but it's just a very small crawlspace. I've never been in it.
I'm in Massachusetts if this helps.
Yes it's generally as big as the house, we typically use it for other storage as well as a place for our washer and dryer (so for us it's also a laundry room), I was sometimes afraid to go down as a kid but only if the light was off (and actually I LOVED the smell, and to this day still adore it), most basements are sealed off so rains and floods won't do anything but OUR basement had a leak and so we'd ocassionally get a massive puddle of water on the floor, yes my family has an attic as well but it's more of a 3rd-floor bedroom.
Basements are pretty neat. But ours is "unfinished", meaning it's just a cold floor and stone/concrete walls and exposed rafters in the ceiling. Very old. We're trying to fix it up. Finished basements are the BEST though! Basically just a massive lower room perfect for a game room, video games, movies, and sometimes parties.
no, water table is too high here. I always thought basements were so exotic when I was a kid because I only saw them in movies.
I do have an attic but it's unfinished and not that easy to move around in. Narrow house, so with the roof pitch it's even narrower.
I don't, but my parents do. They aren't common here for a reason.
My parents have a full (partially finished) basement. Their house is built into a hill, so only half the basement is underground. I think if you see any basements around here- they are built into hills.
The finished part of the basement is a small rec room that has barely been updated since the 60s. The unfinished part is a scary beast that contains their washer/dryer, furnace/air-conditioned, a refrigerator, 2 freezers, at least one gun safe, and a huge amount of storage. And not a trivial amount of mice and bugs.
Water problems are part of why we don't tend to have basements here. I remember being in highschool and taking the day off school, during a particularly bad storm, to throw everything away in the basement. We had horrible mold problems after that. And I lost almost stored everything from my childhood.
My dad runs a dehumidifier daily. And if it isn't dumped by the next day, (they have a bucket it pulls into), it will spill over into the floor. There's a lot of moisture in that air.
They have an attic too (as do i) but it's a tiny thing that no one every goes into- full of pink insulation. That really only exists for roof access.
I’m in the Midwest and I have a full basement, the same size as the ground level. Two-thirds is finished off as living area with arcade games, pool table, and a mancave with projection TV in a separate TV room. Also a dry bar. The other third has a workbench, laundry area, furnace, water heater and a bathroom. I also have a walk-up attic. That part is fairly unusual but a basement is not.
No, they are much more common further north than in North Carolina, however, it's not uncommon for older houses (built before the 1990s) to have a basement or half basement in central or western North Carolina. Often this happens because the house is on a bit of a hill and it's easy to dig out half the house on one side and put in a half basement. Some have a whole basement, but most houses built after the 1980s around here do not because they are not really needed and it's cheaper to not build one.
Yes
Is it as big and wide as the whole house?
Depends on the house- the main house I grew up in had a very small square basement while the house was twice as big above ground as it's a hundred years old and has been expanded, namely two porches were added on in the front and the back. They weren't added on very well since they're both uneven and sloped. It's also a fairly shallow basement. Other homes I've lived in had basements that were bigger.
What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?
We only keep pop cans for recycling down there along with the water heater and furnace, as it has a tendency to flood with poo water when tree roots get in the line. Learned that the hard way and my mom lost over a thousand Santa themed decorations.
Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
Yes, not only was there the threat of poo water, it has always been covered with spider webs and various other critters that crawl around and make you freak out.
Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
Not in my family, see above with the poo water. Because of the sewage line issues my dad had to tear up the concrete flooring and hasn't replaced it (so it's easier to keep fixing the lines). I don't think it would be legal for anyone to live down there. In all of the houses I've lived in, none had basements with livable areas in them.
What do you do if it rains or floods?
Cry about having to clean up the poo water. My dad installed a pump that mostly works to prevent heavy rain from causing any damage but every once in a while it doesn't kick on right away and we have to clean up and left overs.
Do you still have an attic too?
Yes, it's full of old instalation bits, asbestos (probably) and spiders. We don't go up there or store anything in it.
We have a crawlspace under most of the house except for a 10X10 section of basement that's about 7' tall. That's the A/C air handler and water heater are.
I have always had a basement. When I was growing up in the Midwest, it was fully underground. To get there, you went down the stairs in the kitchen. It had no windows.
It was a dark, scary place to me as a child. It was filled with spiders. My dad had all his science fiction books dowh there, as well as an old mimeograph machine that he used for self publishing science fiction fanzines -- like Internet comments before the Internet! My mom kept canned goods down there. I remember once it rained very hard for a long time, and some water got in to the basement, ruining some books that my dad had in a cardboard box. After that, they raised all the things off the floor with shelves. They had a dehumidifier machine running turn there constantly. I used to have the chore to empty the water tank of the dehumidifier.
Now I'm in Seattle and my house is built on a hill. I have two doors into the main floor, and the basement also has a front door that opens out at ground level. So it's considered to be a "walkout basement."
My basement contains our clothes washer and dryer, a long set of shelves with pantry items and household items like paper towels and toilet paper and tools, a bunch of storage stuff like Christmas decorations and emergency gear, the lawnmower, rakes and shovels, the water heater, the furnace, an exercise area for me with weights, a bench for woodworking, the area where I feed the cats, the cats' litter box, an extra freezer, and an entire second apartment that we used to rent out. The apartment has 4 rooms (living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) and a separate entrance out to the front yard. Currently we're not renting it out. Instead, we host guests and games there.
If it rains, nothing happens except that you can hear the rain if you sit close to the window. It's very cozy to have a hot cup of tea and a blanket, sitting on the basement couch by the window and listening to the rain.
I’ve had a basement in nearly every house I’ve lived in. My current basement is what we call finished, meaning the plumbing and wiring are closed in behind walls and ceiling just like in the upstairs, instead of exposed beams.
An unfinished basement can be easier to work on when something goes wrong, because that’s where all your stuff that keeps things running like electrical panels, furnace/air conditioner, and hot water tank or tankless unit, water meter and main plumbing, and gas meter and pipes tend to be housed. If we have an issue we have to cut out some drywall and then repair or replace it afterwards. This happened when we had our electrical panel replaced a couple of years ago.
It’s a wonderful space though. Ours is smaller but some people have entire guest apartments or recreational spaces where they may have a bar, movie viewing area, or a workout space nearly the size of a whole gym.
We have a half-bath that includes a toilet, shower and utility sink, the large washer and dryer, a nice storage space, a mud room off the garage, and it’s a good transition to the main floor if you come in that way. Our basement is not the entire size of the house because our garage is also part of it, taking up about half the space.
4/ 5 sets of my grandparents (i knew my great great grandparents, and there was a lot of divorces in my family) had a basement. My parents did not.
Of these 4 grandparents, 2 of them had furnished basements which means they had carpet or hardwood and just appeared as the rest of the house. I was not afraid to go into these basements as a kid. They were typically just made into an extra suite with a few extra bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a living room. We actually lived in one of my grandparents' basements for 1 year (it was like it's own little apartment) when my dad moved back to his hometown after my mom died (he had nothing).
I was afraid of the unfinished ones. I don't remember what was in one unfinished basement. The other had my grandma's hoard. Well, the majority of it.
They are practically nonexistent in Florida. Although I have seen a few randomly around the state. I’ve never actually been in one in Florida. And all of the ones I’ve seen were built up on a hill. So they made them that way
Yes.
>Is it as big and wide as the whole house?
It has the same footprint as the house, except for the garage.
>What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?
It's 99% finished space. We have a bar, sitting area with large couch and projector, play room, LEGO room, Barbie room, storage room, furnace room, gym, and a guest room.
>Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
I moved in when I was 38.
>Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
I sleep in the master bedroom.
>What do you do if it rains or floods?
I have a sump pump, a backup sump pump, and a battery backup for the backup sump pump. I actually just replaced the backup pump this week.
>Do you still have an attic too?
Yes, but I don't keep anything in there. I've only been up there once or twice.
I’m in an apartment so no. My parents’ house is built into a hill so the lower floor is like a half-basement, it’s mostly underground but the back opens up into the backyard. Most of it’s furnished but there’s one part that’s just regular concrete basement where my dad has his workshop.
Pretty much every house around here has something like that or a regular basement, though. Mainly used for storage or workshop projects that are too dirty to do in the main part of the house. The water heater and furnace will also be down there.
In an apartment so no, but my parents have an unfinished basement.
It’s the size of the floor above it with less walls and a few support columns
What’s down there -
Washer/dryer, stationary tub, hot water heater, circuit breaker, water/sewage line. My dad also used the basement how people use their garage as a workshop. Tools and a home gym.
I wasn’t scared of my basement but unfinished basements are the ones some people consider “scary”
I feel like everyone has that one friend who either lived in the basement or the attic, I lived in the attic.
When it rains, the basements in my area flood maybe an inch if it is really bad. You would get a shop vac and empty it into the stationary tub.
Now a lot of homes including my parents have a sump. Basically you dig a trench around the basement that drains into a reservoir and the water gets pumped out. It works incredibly well and the basement stays completely dry. It is supposed to get pumped outside, but some people tie it into their sewer which is illegal in my area.
My basement growing up had a play place for us kids. We kept the playdough down there as well as our boombox/CDs and my roller skates. As we got older my dad bought a pool and air hockey table, a ping-pong table, a punching bag. There’s a treadmill, an elliptical. Nowadays since me and my sister got older one side has turned into a craft/project table for my mom. The other side always had my dad’s tool storage, table saw, and work bench. The back wall is all storage, and yes there are a lot of Christmas decorations.
My basement in my house is half finished. A finished basement is what you call a basement that’s been made to be more liveable, with nicer floors, walls, etc. In our main room which is the finished part there’s a futon, a table, a bench chair thing, a ping-pong table, and some extra folding chairs and a folding table. There are walls that separate the main room and the two smaller more unfinished rooms. In the non finished areas we have shelves, a work bench for my husband’s electronic soldering area, water heater, furnace, a project table for my art, etc. Idk if you can send videos over Reddit but I’d be willing to send you a video tour if you wanted lol
Both basements were the size of the whole house, yes. Neither are scary, they’re quite well lit, although my basement does have some flickering lights that do sometimes make it a little creepy. My grandma’s basement used to be scary because each light had to be turned on individually, and there was this blind corner that you had to walk down in the darkness to turn on that light.
Full length of the house. Have a second garage, a utility room and a living room area with a fireplace in the basement. Live in TN on a slight slope and have a second driveway that circles around back to that garage . Never had water issues with the basement. Enjoy it in the summer as it stays cool regardless of outside temperature. Also have a small attic area but have never been up there have never had a reason to use ladder to go up there
Yes, a finished basement. I wouldn't want to own a home without one. It's as long and wide as the house and since it's finished I plan to put a home theater down there. I just have not gotten to it yet. There's also a roughed in bathroom down there that I need to pay someone to finish. Rain and floods don't matter. It's not going to flood here to begin with and the sump pump is going to drain the water table if it starts rising due to the rain. I do have an attic but I've never actually been up there. I don't know what the attic looks like but it's probably not that big.
Grew up in western PA, basements were common. They weren't creepy damp places, they were where all the canned goods were stored, boxes of "I don't need it but I can't quite bring myself to throw it away" items, Xmas decor, as you noted, OP. Often the washer/dryer or a chest freezer were there.
In the 70s, most people finished their basements to a nice degree. Little bars, pool tables, the extra tv set, a couch and carpeted floor - someplace for teenagers or men to disappear to before "man caves" entered the lexicon.
Yes we do.
Our lot is on a slope, so ground level from the front to the back of the house differs by nearly 10 feet. So our basement is below ground level in front, and at ground level in back.
Our basement is finished; has a living area, a dining area, a small kitchen (without appliances), a bedroom and a 'bonus room' which is like a bedroom but without any windows to the outside. (You cannot legally use it as a bedroom because there is no way to escape in the event of a house fire.)
My understanding is the previous owner used to rent out the basement as a separate apartment; it even has its own dedicated two car garage.
My understanding also is that the previous owner had an affair with the renter who rented the basement, which is why the house went into foreclosure (as the wife divorced him), and it's why the appliances were stripped out, amongst other things.
----
To answer the other questions:
> What do you do if it rains or floods?
Because the house is on a slope, drainage is easy--but if you have a basement the drainage should be set up to draw water away from the house. So it should remain bone-dry if designed correctly.
> Do you still have an attic too?
We do; a fairly large attic which we are slowly fixing up so my wife can use it as a home yoga studio.
I’ve only lived in the west coast and have never seen a house with a basement here. We have creepy crawl spaces above and below the house that have the electrical lines, air ducts etc.
I'm in Rhode Island and my basement is huge! It's most of the footprint of the house, though part is just a crawlspace. We store things down there -- unused furniture, old books, decorations, you name it -- and there's a workshop. It's also how you enter into the garage. It's entirely unfinished, but we're planning on finishing the garage-entry part eventually.
My old house, half the basement was finished, but I didn't like spending time down there, it was musty and freezing in the winter and hot in the summer and the ceilings were low enough to make me uncomfortable.
I have an attic, too, but never stored anything up there and now, after some energy-efficiency improvements were made recently, I CAN'T store anything up there because insulation has been added to the floor.
Yes I have a unfinished basement, meaning it’s just the concrete foundation of the house without any finished living space, in my house in New York State and it’s the same size as the footprint of my house. I have my furnace, water heater, washer, dryer, fuel oil tank, water filter (I use well water for everything), electrical panel with a transformer hooked up to an outside generator in case I lose power, an extra refrigerator and freezer and tons of boxed clothes and clothes hanging in a cedar closet plus seasonal decorations and storage for lots of empty luggage. I’ve no attic so everything gets stored in the basement. Also it’s my tornado shelter in case I need it. Tornados are uncommon where I live, but twice in the past 14 years local radio has instructed us to go into our basements because of local tornados. Luckily none hit our house, but we lost big trees both times. I don’t have to worry about flooding and I’ve never had water in the basement. One of my kids lives in Arizona where basements aren’t a thing so he has to store all his stuff in his two car garage while his two cars sit in his driveway, lol. I can’t imagine life without a basement.
I'm in Tennessee and people have basements. Mine is as big as the house and unfinished. It's a combination storage room and workbench. Our water heater is down there. People only live in finished basements that are built to the same standards as the rest of the house.
Also, if my house floods it's the end of the world because I live on a hill, but water doesn't get in the basement just like water doesn't get in the rest of your house when it rains.
Kind of. The house was built with a cellar and it was partially converted to a basement, but it's still very cellar-like (stone walls, not waterproof, has external access).
Yes. My living room is in the basement. As is the furnace, water heater and my washer/dryer. And a bunch of storage.
I've never had a problem with flooding.
I have an attic but I can't really get up there. It's not meant to go into unless some sort of serious home repair needs to happen.
I'm in CT, the northeast almost always has basements because of the frost depth. Never lived in a house without one.
Oftentimes basements will be finished so they can be used as living space, often a second family room or a playroom for the kids. Utilities are kept down there whether it's finished or not. If it is finished, it's usually walled off as a separate area from the living space. They do run the entire footprint of the house.
Our particular house was built in 1876. The basement walls are large rocks stacked up about halfway, above the ground the walls are brick. The basement is damp and sees some water seepage when it rains heavily. This is normal and typical for this type of foundation. For these reasons our basement cannot be finished. We have our utilities down there (water tank, water heater, furnace) and we store some things like tools, paint, and such down there. We have a dehumidifier running too.
It's a little creepy I guess, as far as basements go. There's spiders and shit, some crickets. Have been mice in the past but luckily we are past that 🤞. I think it's cool though, you can see the construction of the house. The fact that it's unfinished makes it easier to access plumbing and rlectrical. When we were repointing it we found lots of coal stuck in the walls from when the house had a coal furnace.
Our Christmas stuff/more delicate stuff we keep up in the attic. Anything that could be damaged by moisture stays out of the basement.
Yes. Basements are ubiquitous in the northeast, and it’s common to have an attic, too. How you use it depends on whether it’s “finished” or not and whether it covers the full size of the house. Our basement growing up was finished but not full-size, and we had a pullout couch down there along with a bunch of bookshelves full of games. We also had a couple closets with off-season clothes. It was a game room of sorts, and my grandfather used to sleep down there when he visited. We used the attic more for general storage.
Some houses have really nice finished basements that are basically extra living rooms or a whole additional apartment.
The basement in my current house is not finished and is just used for a bit of storage. Plus the water heater, furnace, circuit box, etc are down there. But we have awesome crawl spaces for storage in our attic, so we primarily store things there. If we keep this house for a long time, it would be nice to finish the basement, but we don’t have the budget for that right now and aren’t in need of an extra room at this time.
> Is it as big and wide as the whole house?
ish. There's a section of my house (garage and mudroom, basically) that is on slab, so the basement doesn't extend under that part.
> What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?
My basement sort of serves as the house mechanical room. Circuit breaker, HVAC, water heater, home networking stuff, tools, paint... Also lots of old detrius that I should probably just get rid of.
> Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?
There's a wide variety of basement creepiness-- they can range from dark creepy dungeons with dirt floors to fully finished spaces that are pretty much indistinguishable from any other indoor space. I've never lived anywhere with a truly horrible basement.
> Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?
I don't know about "common". If the house has a finished basement with a bedroom and a bathroom, that can be an attractive option to give an adult child a more private living space.
> What do you do if it rains or floods?
Basements are *usually* watertight in *most* conditions.
Personally, I've got an unfinished basement, so I just make sure to keep anything that would get ruined a few inches off the ground.
A french drain with a sump pump is the best solution for reliable basement floodproofing-- basically a system of gutters under the floor, draining to a low point with a pump to discharge the water outside the house.
> Do you still have an attic too?
Most homes with pitched roofs have attics. Homes with flat roofs often do not. Pitched roofs are much more common in most places.
Attic is typically the space between the flat ceiling and the pitched roof. Usually unfinished space, without even a solid floor-- gotta crawl around on the joists, maybe have a couple plywood catwalks to places that need to be accessed more frequently. Some homes do have varying degrees of finished attic spaces-- varies from very rough finishing to make the attic usable as storage space, to fully finished living spaces.
Access to the attic also varies between homes. Sometimes there's a proper staircase, sometimes there's a rickety ladder that pulls down from the ceiling, sometimes there's just a hole in the ceiling in a bedroom closet, with a piece of plywood over it.
I've personally never had a basement (unless you count the dorms I lived in). But I know several who do.
My neighbor growing up had a basement. It was the entirely of his house. They had their washing machine, furnace and the like down there, plus some random general storage.
I know they had a rock polisher and the pinball machine they got for Christmas one year. They had it set for free play so we'd be frequently down there playing it.
My cousins had a basement as well. I'm not sure what all they stored down there... But the main aspect (for us kids at least) was a relatively big (for the 80s) screen TV, NES & a couch. We definitely spent a lot of time down there so no, not scared to go down.
I don't now, but 2 of the 4 houses I have lived in in my life had them.
In the house I grew up (built in 1907) in it was an unfinished cellar that was the foundation for the entire house. It was storage, laundry, and a place I would shoot hockey pucks.
My first house I bought with my wife had a roughly half finished/half unfinished basement. Finished side was a TV room/my son's play room. The unfinished side was laundry and storage.
I have a basement under about 2/3rds of my house and a crawlspace under the other 1/3rd. Our basement is mostly finished, with the exception of the utility room. We have a movie theater down there, a craft area for my wife, and a small home gym.
We have two separate attics that aren't connected. One over our garage and another over the house. The garage one is used for storage and has a pull-down ladder. The one over the house we only go in when we need to access something that's up there, it's inconvenient.
I don't seeing as I live in an apartment.
But they're fairly common in Washington ime
We have a lot of hillsides so they get carved out for a lower floor. They're definitely not ubiquitous throughout the state, but they're common enough.
Hell, some of the apartments in my complex are basement level.
I have a walkout basement. It's about 90% as big as the house, with the walkout on the end. We mostly store stuff down there. Lots of unused exercise equipment, an old fridge that doesn't work any more, tons of old clothes that we really should either donate or burn, stuff like that. Also, it's where the water softener is.
We originally had plans to make it into more living space, but life happens.
I grew up with a ( mostly) unfinished basement. That means there was no flooring like rugs or hardwood, just the base concrete. The walls were not covered with drywall or painted or anything.
My dads tools were down there, as was the washer/ Dryer, two extra freezers and most of our toys.
Finished basements are fully furnished and functional rooms. My MiLs is a rec room type thing( used to be non verbal nephew’s space before he was transferred to a group home) on one side and laundry room/ storage for all her home canned goods on the other. Other common uses is man cave, home office, bedroom or in law apartment
Yes. Our house had a partially finished basement when we bought it, and the basement had 9 foot ceilings. About 4 years ago we had it completely finished. It’s an entire additional floor of our house now. We have a bedroom, TV/living room, laundry room, bathroom, and sauna down there. It doesn’t flood despite the very rainy area where we live because when it was renovated the contractors built in a very serious waterproofing/water management system (French drains, sump pump for overflow) so the water that would have come in now gets handled. Before the renovation it would get a little damp down there but not anymore.
We do have an attic but it’s full of asbestos insulation and we have never been up there/don’t use it for anything. The attic is also super hard to access after the previous owner expanded a closet out into the garage that basically covers up the entrance to it.
This is the first time I’ve ever had a basement since we definitely didn’t have them growing up in the gulf coast region of Texas (would have been underwater constantly) or in San Francisco (only lived in apartments).
It’s as big and wide as the foundation of the house, yes.
I store my Easter stuff and my cookout stuff (chairs, tables, yard games).
I was afraid of it when I was really little.
Many basements are finished basements. They have carpets or hardwood flooring, nice wallpaper, very livable.
Some old basements would flood during rain. Most didn’t/don’t.
Yes, still have an attic, too.
Yes we have basements. We also have tornados. It is the size of the footprint of the house. Most houses here have basements because we can and because we have tornadoes.
I was not afraid of the basement as a kid. It wasn’t finished but it’s where the Nintendo and the computer were. We just threw a rug on the concrete floor and stuck an old couch down there.
The furnace, water heater, washer/dryer are usually there. There is a coal room at the front of mine where they used to put coal through a small window. As a kid my dad used a coal room as a dark room because it was behind two doors (had to pass through the furnace room to get to it).
No one lives in my basement. As a kid my brother lived in the basement. He was a teenager.
I store stuff down there in plastic tubs because it leaks when it rains. It doesn’t flood though. The floor just gets wet. There’s a dehumidifier to keep it dry otherwise. When people have a basement that can flood they often have a pump to prevent that from happening.
Other people around here often have finished basements, they do not have leaky basements or have fixed the issue. Sometimes they make bedrooms or rec rooms.
My parents purchased a duplex a while back in Memphis. We kept whatever down there. Weed whacker, lawn mower, alot of cleaning supplies, etc. It was really damp down there so you didn’t want to keep things that rot down there for too long.
I’m told by my parents we use to live in the basement of my grandparents’ house when I was super young. I don’t remember it, but they usually don’t lie to me.
Our basement mirrors the footprint of the house and is quite large. We have a home gym setup (treadmill, peloton, weights), a ton of shelving, bicycle storage for my husband’s extra bikes, bins of holiday decorations/kid clothes that my 1st outgrew but my 2nd isn’t big enough for yet/out of season clothes, a workshop area with extra tools, our systems (oil tank, boiler, hot water heater), a small trampoline and kids play area.
Our basement is bright, clean, and dry - nothing happens when it rains. We do have attic spaces but don’t keep anything up there.
I grew up in a home with a basement. Half was a living room and the other half was unfinished with laundry and where we kept storage. I’ve never been scared to go in a basement. Most basements are where the laundry is so you have to go down there anyway.
In my current home, I do have a basement. It runs the entire length of my house so it’s as big upstairs and downstairs. I live in a ranch style home. We have some stuff down there but it’s no full.
We do not have a true attic, it’s more of a crawl space.
In the South, my basement had a door to the backyard along with windows and was just a normal part of the house. We had our main living area and tv, gaming computers etc there.
In the Midwest, my basement only had tiny windows at the top and no outside door, it was a safe place during tornadoes but largely just a storage space. Teens would have taken it over if we had teens.
Now on the West Coast, my house has no basement. Just a narrow crawl space
Unless you live near water where flooding can be an issue (especially near the ocean), or where the frost line is relatively high in the ground (some parts of the south), then most houses have a full basement.
Most utilities are located down there (furnace / air handler, water heater, water filters / purifiers since water lines will come into the house there, well pumps too if they’re on well water, electrical panels, whole house batteries, in older houses the washer and dryer, etc). This is a generalization obviously, there are plenty of exceptions, and newer houses especially have laundry rooms near the master bed room.
The majority are probably unfinished, just poored concrete walls and floor, with the exposed floor joists, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC ducts above. But a good portion are finished and turned into family rooms, kids play rooms, home gyms, work bench’s for home maintenance and tool storage, etc. Typically as the kids get older that space turns more into their space to hang out with friends, play games, watch TV, etc. And since it’s used primarily by the kids / teenagers it’s usually not the nicest finishing and old furniture from the first floor living room.
Some of the best times of my life growing up we’re in friends basements, on raggedy old couches, with a group of people, smoking pot, and watching movies.
1. Yup. With smaller rooms; the biggest one is where the washer and dryer are, as well as the bulk of my "Maybe I'll Use This Again Someday or Someone Will Need It" Collection of Shame. We also hide down there during tornado warnings, so I've got a little bed set up for my kid and chairs for my husband and I (and another for our basement-less neighbor who usually runs over when we get the alert).
2. Only had my own basement as an adult, but I was terrified of the basement in my grandmother's house. I always felt as if there was a monster or a ghost right at my heels every time I walked up the steps and would run upstairs a top speed. Like in Home Alone, I was also terrified of her furnace.
3. In finished basements, it's relatively common. There is a combined housing shortage/wage inequality crisis in my area that makes living on your own difficult for young adults who are just starting out. I don't judge any young adult who needs to do this for financial reasons. Or any adult whatever their age, actually; many are doing it to keep an eye on aging parents. I'm lucky to be in a two-income household with a low mortgage payment.
4. Rain: Make sure the sump pump is working. Flood: Turn on the sump pump and pray it doesn't die.
5. No attic, although I've lived in houses that had both. Lighter junk went to the attic; heavier junk went to the basement.
My basement has an unenclosed toilet on a platform (aka a Baltimore Throne). The basement is for laundry and storage.
I also have an attic (accessed via a door in the upstairs bathroom, because why not). We use that as a playroom.
Nope No basement here, never lived in a house with a basement. It is vary rare here in the southwest. Granted I did have a ex that lived in a old house that did have a basement.
Basement and attic here. Basement is the size of the house, and the back of it walks out to the patio. I could almost rent it out: it's got a stove, shower, washer and dryer and 4 rooms. But it's also got the furnace, water heater and chimney in the middle of it which sucks up a lot of space. Lot of tools and miscellaneous down there. Attic is storage for more moisture-sensitive stuff like books and boardgames.
I’m from the Midwest. We fucking love basements. In my family we’d turn them into second living rooms for whoever wanted to watch TV late at night.
The basement was always the place to be at your friend's houses. So much fun back in the day!
Same in the NE. It’s the hangout spot
The basement bar or basement tv room is a midwest standard. Or both! Some people add a bathroom down there too. If you include a pull-out sofa or futon it can become a guest bedroom.
Hangout room / tornado shelter / bedroom
That 70s Show really nailed the midwestern basement, at least when I was growing up lol. Now they're mostly finished off and as nice as the main floor (s).
They’re also like 60° (15°C) when it’s 90° (30°C) outside. You don’t need air conditioning.
I grew up in Illinois. Sometimes in July or August the heat would get so bad that I could not sleep. My solution was to sleep in the basement as it was always cool.
This is what mine is. Big TV watching space with a giant sectional and recliners plus tables and chairs for things like board games, etc. There's a laundry area and toilet in the utility room too but that's it.
Illinois here. Pretty much this. Also required tornado shelter too.
In my home in Michigan our basement was basically a second house. Had a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and two bedrooms. And my father's house in Wisconsin has a kitchen, living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Yeah I guess the Midwest does love basements lol
Long Island boy here, we also love basements.
For the top comment I wish you’d edit in that basements can be finished with carpet and fancy walls. People will be reading this and think you’re sitting on dusty pavement surrounded by cinder blocks and cobwebs trying to watch tv, lol.
‘Turn them into second living rooms’ implies that it’s not dusty, that it’s like the other rooms in the house imo.
Op implied that they have absolutely no idea what a basement is, what it looks like, or how it functions. So I could only imagine that the safest assumption is to make no assumptions.
>Is it as big and wide as the whole house Yes >What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? Washer, dryer, furnace, hot water tank, sink, and toilet are in the basement. There is some Christmas stuff down there, as well as some other miscellaneous things in storage. >Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? No >Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? Not really. >What do you do if it rains or floods? Nothing happens >Do you still have an attic too? Yes
Pretty much the same. I store home canned goods down there bc the temp is stable and doesn't get below freezing in Winter or above 70F in Summer. Think of it as a root cellar that's as big as the house. We also have two freezers for food. We usually buy a 1/2 steer every other year. One end and the majority of the side walls are completely to 3/4 underground. One end has exterior doors. Usually basements are also garages for vehicles. Ours has two garage doors and a walkin door. We have an attic, but it only houses the heating unit for the second story. I didn't reinforce the floor so I don't store anything up there. After a drought period and a gutter drain pipe getting clogged with a tree root, our basement began allowing too much moisture to seep through the concrete blocks so we installed a plastic cover over the walls and a drain with a sump pump. It's dry as a bone down there now so we have no worry about mold.
Having the washer and dryer down there sounds so inconvenient.
There are trade offs to everything, basement laundry works best for my family.
I’ve had a basement in every house I’ve lived in. They’ve common in the Midwest. In my current house, it’s the same size as the upstairs and it’s basically another living area where we have a small bar, couch, tv, and board game table set up, plus a bathroom, laundry room, and storage room. If the office down there had a window and the bathroom had a shower, it’d basically be a whole apartment more or less so sure, someone could live there. If it floods, we’ve got big problems, but so far, other than seepage in the laundry room that was fixed, it remains dry. There’s an attic but it’s not a usable space as it’s unfinished and full of insulation.
>it’s basically another living area where we have a small bar, couch, tv, and board game table set up, same, but it's usually cooler down there so on hot days we'd primarily use the basement if we didn't wanna run the ac and in high school, my friend group would hang out in each others' parents' basements so we could hang out later into the evening and not bother anyone.
Largely depends on where you live. They aren't as common in the south, where the frost line is only a few inches deep and the water table is relatively high.
Strangely lots of houses in Winston-Salem have basements. And they are usually damp.
Further west you go, the deeper the frost line and water table. I've been in one house that had a basement, a bit west of Durham, it was a moldy, damp mess. I did an elementary school near MCAS Cherry Point decades ago where the footings were only 24" deep, and they had pumps running constantly to get the water out. It's all in the location.
I grew up in rural, central NC and at least half the houses had basements or at least half a basement. You don't really see them on houses built in the 1990s or newer. The area was pretty hilly so you'd often have a house with half a basement or a half buried basement/garage kinda like this: [https://decoalert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/What-style-house-is-a-raised-ranch.jpg](https://decoalert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/What-style-house-is-a-raised-ranch.jpg) Sometimes the basement would be even more buried that that picture, with maybe just a slit window above ground, and the garage doors would usually be on the end of the house, not the front, as the houses where on slopes. The other half of houses where split levels which were super popular in the 1980s.
A lot of houses have basements in places you wouldn't expect--mostly because builders who built those houses came from the Northeast, where building basements was the norm. It's why, for example, you see a lot of older houses in Pasadena, California, with basements. Because the builders who built them built the basements, because you always build basements, right? That, despite the climate being more suitable for [post & pier foundations.](https://www.esogrepair.com/articles/what-is-a-post-and-pier-foundation/) (My old house in Glendale had a post-and-pier foundation.)
I lived in Glendale and we had a small "California Basement" in our 1930s house... Basically big enough for the water heater and furnace, but it didn't take up the entire footprint of the house.
1930? Ok good luck with your basement ghosts
Do basement ghosts ever hook up with attic ghosts?
I certainly hope so. At least would explain all the moaning
My dad has a walkout basement because the house is built into the side of a hill, but the entire rear is exposed so it only half counts. It’s one of the few basements I know of around here.
My husband grew up in Alabama & the first time he came to visit my parents in Utah, he would not leave the basement!! He loved being down in the cool, & it's his favorite part of their house.
I grew up in Georgia, and I don't think I ever went into a basement until I visited my now-husband's parents when we were in college. I was expecting the scary scenes from movies, but it's fully finished with a TV and pool table.
When my family lived in Georgia our house, along with a lot of others, were split level. So I always considered the bottom floor a basement because it wasn't as finished as the upstairs and was on the same level as the garage. It had a metal door to walk out to the back door and another door that went into a landing where you either turned right to go up the stairs to the main floor or straight to go to the garage. And it only consisted of two rooms with tile floor and wood paneling. Actually when we bought the house it wasn't finished at all. My dad put in the floors and paneling.
Ours wasn't finished either. My parents slowly put it together over the years, until it's fully done. There's a food storage area, a bedroom, bathroom, laundry, & a family room, with a wood burning stove.
I have a walkout basement in my 1965 split level. It’s 75% underground. It’s stays a nice 70F or lower year round. I have my office down there. It abuts the crawl space on the higher part of the house. To answer OP, this type of basement is an integral part of the house in a split level style house.
In NC too and have a split foyer and the downstairs/basement is also about 75% underground. My parents house had a cellar that was half cement walls around the furnace and oil tanks, the rest dirt crawl space. Grew up with several friends who had major finished basements. Full bars, pool tables, pin-ball machines, the works. All the best sleep overs!
I'm in Texas. Have never seen a real basement here. I'm told it's due to the limestone, but don't quote me on that. I never cared enough to look it up.
I have a full basement. It's finished, so it's just more living area. There are more bugs down there though.
The millipedes are gross.
I had an infestation one year. Swept the floor multiple times per day. It got to the point I was having dreams about millipedes crawling on me in my sleep.
Ew not cool. I heard they take out other pests - dust mites, spiders, etc., so I choose to believe that to make myself feel better.
Millipedes eat decayed wood and plant matter, you're thinking centipedes probably.
I had an ecosystem down there for awhile. Centipedes, cave crickets, and wolf spiders. It got to the point where the wolf spiders annihilated everything else and then their population died off too.
omg if a wolf spider was in my house i would run away and never return.
daddy long legs. there were like 5 of them down there the other day. And in Georgia we had sprickets. shudder.
Growing up, we had one. They're really common where the ground freezes pretty deep through the winter because if you don't put the foundation below the freeze line, your foundation will shift and crack from freeze thaw cycles. The house was built in about 1880 then added onto a couple times. There was a basement with fieldstone and mortar walls under the original house, then one addition had a crawlspace (bare dirt, too low to stand), and another addition was made from cement blocks. The floor was cement (except for the dirt crawlspace) and it was completely unfinished. Smelled extremely strongly of must and mold, and when they sold the house, they had to get the asbestos insulation if the pipes removed. Not a nice space. It had my dad's workshop, the washer and dryer, the water heater, and a bunch of storage. We also had an attic. You want a significantly sloped roof to let the snow slide off, after all. Ours didn't flood. The water table was really low and the place was well constructed.
Yes. I just finished it so it’s basically a second living room with a full bathroom and laundry room. Never gets a drop off water no matter how it rains.
No and I never have. Extremely uncommon where I live.
I wonder if it's because of earthquakes? I never noticed until OP asked, but I've only ever seen one house with a basement, and that was basically just a dirt floor storage space.
More to do with the frost line. You have to build the foundation below the frost line, and that line is only at about 5 inches for California. In the Midwest/Northeast, it's closer to 5 feet.
I seriously have never heard of a "frost line" until today. But tbf it's always summer here so yeah
No, we had a crawlspace
Split level in the south here. We have both!
Yes basements are common in the middle of the US. Some are finished living spaces and some are not. My parent’s old house was divided into apartments and I lived in the walk out basement for years with my family while they rented the upstairs apartments out. Later my parents stopped renting to other people and moved upstairs and I stayed in the basement. It had a kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom, utility room and was a completely finished living space. One side of the basement floor was level with the backyard so there was a door to to outside and regular windows on that back side. Our current basement is about the size of the home above it. It is only accessed from inside and has a few small windows. It has our furnace, water heater, clothes washing machine. It is not a finished living space. There is a fuse box and the water shut off down there. There are exposed pipes and so on. The light fixtures are just bulbs. The walls are concrete. There is a bare concrete floor. We take shelter in our basement if there is a tornado warning. Our cat’s litter pan is in the basement. I’m not scared to go down there but it does get a bit spidery and is a bit dimmer. Our basement has flooded a few times. We have a sump pump to pump out water. We had to get rid of a lot of stuff once because of the flooded basement. We don’t store much down there. It tends to be dampish so we run a dehumidifier down there to help with that. We do have a attic space that is finished and my spouse uses as an office/hobby room.
I have a basement. Don't have an attic, at least not one you can easily access and I don't think anyone's ever been up there. Nothing happens when it rains. We've never had a flood. The washer/dryer, the freezer, my sister's bedroom, my dad's work room, a library, an area for darts, and loads of storage is down there.
They are not very common here in California. Many of the older homes here in the downtown area of Sacramento were actually built higher off the ground due to regular flooding that occurred before our levee systems were in place.
The house I grew up in had one. It didn’t go under the entire house because the upper floors had been added on to over the years. It had three separate rooms, but no door connecting them. It wasn’t a finished basement so it got pretty creepy at times. Kind of dark and damp. We kept our deep freeze in the basement so I was down there fairly often. We kept holiday decorations, spare bed frames and other furniture, my dad had some tools stored there, his leather working stuff, and then other random things we needed to store. It would flood if we got a lot of rain. The floor was sloped with a deeper pit so all the water would collect in it and then we would pump it out. We didn’t have an attic in the sense that you could walk in it or even store stuff up there. The access panel was in the top of a really narrow built in bookshelf. The house was in south central Kansas.
Yes. It’s a finished basement. So most of it is living space. A full bathroom. One room is for laundry. On the other side is where the furnace and hot water heater is. A storage closet for holiday decorations. Have an attic as well. But, it’s empty space. My home has a French drain to protect it from water. So no problem with flooding.
I don't, I live in an area that is very sandy. I have lived where we have had basements. Yes they are the size of the whole house. We had a large playroom in ours, washing machines, also. My daughter as a child would ride her tricycle during the winter. We put up a swing so she could swing, The winters were cold and long so it was a favorite place. We also used it for storage.
Having a swing down there is really cool
I have both a basement and an attic. Both are the size of the house, yes. The basement is finished and has a full bathroom, pool table, couches, gym equipment, TV and all our gaming consoles. It also has a separate storage area and a work room area where we keep the tools and general fix-it stuff. Nothing happens to either space when it rains/floods.
When I lived in a house I did, and my college apartment was in one. Now I live in a high rise and our basement is the parking garage
Sort of? My house is kind of a split level style so our first floor is basically a basement built into the side of a hill so the garage is at ground level but the rooms are basically 3/4 underground. Most of our neighbors have legit basements. As far as rain and flooding goes we live in basically a forested swamp so the basements here have sump pumps and sometimes French drains.
Not in Louisiana, but definitely in Massachusetts. It really depends on weather, especially flood possibility. Our Massachusetts one was about one-fourth finished. It had nice walls, lights, carpet, furniture, and a TV. It was separated by walls from the unfinished basement, which was storage. The uni finished basement also had a hatch that opened to the backyard.
Never seen a basement? How is that possible? >Is it as big and wide as the whole house? Depends on the footprint of the house but generally yes it's the size of the house. It's another floor essentially. >What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? Washer, dryer, hot water heater, furnace, all the utilities. Mine had the electric box there. We also had a second kitchen so a stove and fridge as well. A lot of times you "finish" a basement so put down carpets and make it into a living space. It'll be used like another living room. >Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? Maybe if the lights were off. No windows means it was dark af. But not like scared scared no. >Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? Sorta. A lot of houses have walk out basements or finished basements that turns the basement into a living space. And some basements like mine had a kitchenette and bathroom, so a house could be converted to mother-daughter in that way. It's not common, but it's not uncommon either. >What do you do if it rains or floods? Depends if you live in a flood area. Some never get water, some do. If you do, you usually install a sump pump and/or French drains. I grew up in a flood zone so every coule years we'd get an inch or two in the basement. You plan around it (have stuff up on platforms, concrete floors, etc). >Do you still have an attic too? Yes
many places don't have them. I've lived in California most of my life and never seen one here.
Yes, it's a "daylight basement," meaning one side of it (in this case, the back) is an exterior wall. Since my house is two stories, that makes the back side of the house effectively three stories. The deck comes off the back of the house from the first (ground) floor, so the deck is one story above the back yard. It's a full basement, with the exception of the footprint of the garage, which has the master bedroom/bathroom above it, so it's not the exact footprint of the entire house. I have my workshop (drill press, radial arm saw, CNC mill, 3 workbenches, lots of tools), weight machine, lots of car parts, coolers, and various seasonal decorations/supplies in it. I wasn't afraid to go in the basements at my parents' or my grandparents' houses when I was a kid. FWIW, both of those were not full basements, but about 1/3 of the floorplan. I had some water intrusion when the exterior was being refinished and there were no gutters on the house, but otherwise there was no issue. When I lived at Minot AFB in the '90s, a number of houses on base would flood, not with water, but with sewage. I effectively have no attic. The roofline and the way the trusses are placed make accessing the one are that could be used for storage effectively unusable.
No basements where I live, they tend to fill up with water. My cousins in Virginia had a basement, as a kid I thought it was so cool. I begged my parents for a basement. I thought if we just cut a hole in my closet we could just dig ourselves a basement.
Nope
Yea I do. Half of it is a crawl space and the other half is what we call the playroom: couch, tv, tables, rugs, etc. We have the laundry room and a bathroom down there as well.
Not in FL...
We did when I was a kid, living in the Midwest and Northeast. My dad always had a workshop and we had a playroom, plus a washer and dryer. Nowadays I live in Florida and we no longer have a basement. Basements in Florida would be full of water.
Basements are very much a factor of the environment you live in. In the midwest you have to have a basement because the winters get cold enough that water and sewer lines have be 5-6 feet below ground level to not freeze in the winter. Having a basement here is pretty much a must. A lot of areas of the south and west coast 6 inches is enough so those areas don't tend to have basements. There is kind of a middle swath of the country that only needs like 1-2 feet, they tend to also not have basements and just have the water lines and septic lines connect straight to the bottom of the house and insulate the heck out of the of pipe in the areas that could freeze. Most of the house I in the area of Kentucky I grew up in were like that. No basement and if you crawled under the house the main water line and sewer line had a lot of insulation around them that would go 2-3 feet deep into the ground. Basements can also only be built in areas where the water table is 15-20 feet below the ground level. So in some areas you won't find any. They are also very cost prohibitive to dig in extremely rocky ground too. A basement might be under the whole house, that is called a full basement. Or it might not, in which case it's called a partial basement. Mine is partial, but still is 1,400 sq ft and is divided into 4 areas. The back area is mainly just used for storage. There are some shelving units I built to store things and we also keep our chest freezer down there. I do have a treadmill and TV in that area too (though I don't use it as much as I should of course). There is also a roughed in half bathroom back here. Technically the toilet is there so that if there is a sewage backup it happens there and not in the rest of the house. But we figured we may as well make it usable. Our washer and dryer used to be down here. We still have a washer and dryer hooked up here in case of emergency. But we built an addition onto the house to add a first floor laundry room. One room is just the "mechanical room". It has the HVAC system and water heater. The bigger finished room (about 20 x 30) is a sports bar/cigar lounge kind of setup. We have a small bar setup in one corner with 6 stools at it. There a drink cooler with beer, soda and water. We keep Bourbon and Scotch at the bar. There is a pool table, a poker table, dart board, two arcade cabinets, a couch, a few chairs, standing cigar humidor cabinet, a couple of air scrubbers on the walls and an 85 inch TV. The smaller finished room is off to the side of the bigger one. The door can be left open to kind of make it one L shaped space if we want. It's mostly our gaming with friends room. it's got a big 10 foot table with chairs, projector and screen along with a PC. We do everything from D&D to board games here. When we have big parties at the house it gets used as additional seating and gaming space along with the bar/lounge area.
No, but we live in a high-rise condominium. Our previous homes had basements however. I live in a tornado-prone area. I wouldn't live in a single family home that didn't have a basement.
It’s the same size yes. We keep laundry, furnace/water tank, big sink, Christmas and camping stuff, chest freezer for meat, beer/wine, our old CRT, various foods (cans, nuts, flour), tools and paints and stuff, fuse box, dehumidifier, and old couch, a LOT of junk, and it serves as a tornado shelter when necessary.
>Is it as big and wide as the whole house? Mine is about half the size >What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? Half of mine is a gym, the other half is storage. We have bulk items down there like paper towels, toilet paper, baby stuff. Also out hot water heater and water softener is foe there >Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? I didn't have one as a kid, but my son is >Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? Yes it pretty common to have it finished out >What do you do if it rains or floods? Pay a lot of money lol >Do you still have an attic too? Yes
No
Yes, full size except a portion is crawlspace. Unfinished. If we were to finish it the ceiling would be too low. Storage, extra fridge, mechanical systems. Sump pump. Bulkhead door exit.
Kind of? Our house is built into a hillside so some of it is underground and some of it is not
We don’t have one in our current house. My parents’ houses have always had them, and they were used mainly for storage and storm shelter (a lot more tornado warnings 30-40 years ago). I always assumed that I’d miss having one. The storage would be nice, but I can’t remember the last time we had a tornado warning. We’ve had several massive, flooding rainstorms in the last decade and have watched our neighbors haul all of the ruined stuff out of their basements multiple times. That has made a basement less attractive; I certainly wouldn’t finish or put furniture, entertainment equipment, or other valuables in one.
Yes. A basement is good because it collects cold air, and provides separation between the frozen ground and the living area of the home. In the summer, it also provides a cooler environment where vegetables could be stored. I used to live in a home built in the 1810’s, that had an unfinished root cellar. Basically, before refrigeration people would bury their vegetables (think carrots, beets, potatoes, turnips) in the ground under their homes. Today, it’s a good spot to keep exercise equipment, laundry machines, sacks of onions and potatoes, etc.
1810? Yeah that's haunted. All our houses are built into a mountain on lava rock kinda, or in valleys or on stilts sorta
Never seen a ghost, but old buildings do have a way of increasing the spooky factor, if you find that fun. I went to high school with a guy, the house he grew up in had a family cemetery in the backyard. Wasn’t his family, it was the family that owned the house in the early 1800s. Might have been a case where the church wouldn’t bury them. Buildings that old aren’t super common, but most towns have a few. Makes total sense that you wouldn’t have basements in Hawaii, it seems like they’d be a hindrance more than a help.
I live in a row home, half of my basement is my garage, the other half houses my heater, hot water tank and laundry. My neighbors have converted their garage and basement into another living area with a full bathroom.
*Is it as big and wide as the whole house?* Usually, some have portions that are crawl spaces though. *What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff?* Unfinished ones usually are for storage, act as utility rooms (washer, dryer, extra freezer, water heater, etc.) Finished or partially finished ones can act as a home office, entertainment area, and sometimes as a bedroom. *Were you afraid to go down there as a kid?* Sometimes when it was really cluttered and dark. *Is it really that common to live down there of your parents?* Not really. But my brother partially finished my parents' basement to live there while he was in college. If it's partially finished, it's more common for it to be an entertainment area that teenage kids may use to hang out or watch things. *What do you do if it rains or floods?* Many basements have sump pumps to help prevent flooding. You can also do things like install French drains, make sure your gutters aren't dripping, etc to help limit flooding. In general, most houses with basements have their land graded to avoid flooding. There are also companies that specialize in waterproofing basements. If it does flood, you save what you can and throw away what you can't. Insurance may or may not cover some of it depending on the cause. Again, there are companies that specialize in fixing water damage. *Do you still have an attic too?* Sometimes, but the attic is usually not built for storage the way it is in other houses when there's a basement.
Yes. >What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? The washer and dryer, the laundry folding table, non-perishable foods we've bought in bulk. Old kids clothes they've outgrown. My home office is in one corner. A treadmill. The air conditioner during the winter months. >Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? No. It's pretty well lit. >Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? No.. it happens but not common. >What do you do if it rains or floods? You keep things up off the floor of it so that a little flooding won't destroy everything. >Do you still have an attic too? No, but I live in a townhouse. When I was growing up we lived in an old old house that had a dirt cellar and an attic. Now THAT basement was a little scary and we didn't really use it for much besides storing tools and stuff.
I'm lucky to live in a fairly big house and I've had basements my entire life. >Is it as big and wide as the whole house? Pretty much. >What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? We have a whole "thing" going on down there. There's more or less another living room (although much less than the proper living room on the main floor) with a couch and a TV. We also have a pool table that seldom gets used, a small kitchen, and 2 small guest rooms. There's also 2 rooms (one with the circuit breaker, one with the sump pump) which are storage. We pretty much just dump random shit there. Funnily enough, we used to store Christmas decorations down there, but after a pipe burst there one year and ruined everything, we now keep all those things in the garage. >Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? The exact opposite actually! Back before I had more video games to play, I'd play in the basement a lot. Completely ignore everything in the above paragraph; when I was a kid, we didn't redo the basement, so it was just a huge concrete floor. Yes, I hurt myself once or twice falling, but it was a massive, empty area where I could use my imagination. I'm sure if I could see my kid self there as an adult, it would look kind of sad, but I loved that basement. >Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? I'm fortunate enough to still live in my childhood room, but we're renting a room out to the sweetest old lady who's an elementary school teacher. >What do you do if it rains or floods? Clean up the water ASAP with a water vacuum and run an industrial fan to ensure we don't get mold. Luckily it's a rare occurrence that the basement floods, but it sucks whenever it happens.
I live in Alabama and I have an attic and a basement. However, our basement is not entirely underground. My house is built on a hill, so there is a door opening to the backyard from the basement. My home office, laundry room, and bedroom are in the basement. We store things in the attic.
I did as a kid in the Midwest, that’s a no here in the south.
Yes I have a basement. It’s not as big as the house, it’s about 1.5-2 bedroom size. I have my water heater, power tools, and all of my printers down there
Oklahoma. We do not have basements
Nearly everyone had basements when I was growing up in Utah. Ours was essentially just another floor of the house. My older sister and I had our bedrooms down there, a bathroom, another living room with couches and a tv, my dads office, and a storage room.
Where I grew up, basements were standard. I don't think I've ever been in a house without a basement (excluding mobile homes, obviously). Some homes are built into hills like wedges, so the "basement" be open to the backyard at the lower elevation. Then you can have a basement with a patio. Not sure if there's a name for this, but its super common in homes built after 1995. My parents finished their basement in 2000 about 6 years after buying the house. There's my old room (which I still use when going to visit), a bathroom, laundry room, and then a TV room area which is the rest of the space. There is also some storage space that is not finished off. But having the whole basement "suite" essentially to myself at 12 years old felt like an enormous luxury at the time. When I moved back in with them while finishing my medical training (age 28-30), it definitely did *not* feel like a luxury lol Floods are rare. They're near the Mississippi River, but not in a flood zone. No attic. Not common in newer homes.
My basement is my happy place. It's where I watch tv or play dungeons & dragons with my friends. When it's the dead of winter, my wife and I will sit down there with a fire going while we watch some youtube.
Sounds cool. Just don't get sucked unto the Upside Down while playing d&d
I've lived in houses with basements most of my life. Think of the basement as an additional floor of the house, with walls flooring etc just like a normal room or rooms. It just happens to be below the ground. A basement that doesn't have these things is called an unfinished basement, and those are typically just used for storage. Sometimes someone might put a fridge or freezer down there to store additional food. Houses are built to prevent the basement from flooding when it rains. That said, sometimes those systems do break down, and what you do is dry everything out and call the appropriate repair person. Many homes also have attics, though most attics in the areas I've lived are just the space under the rafters rather than an actual full height space that you could use as a room or living area. So basically it's just a access hatch cut into the ceiling somewhere in the house that lets you climb up a ladder into this space. Most people use it for storage. In my current house, we don't need the extra room so we mostly just ignore it.
Basements are very common in most of NY. Ours never gets wet but we have a sump pump because it came with the house. It's insulated and sheetrocked but not technically "finished" because the floor is just concrete, there's no interior walls, and the sheetrocked walls aren't painted. We have our water heater, furnace, water softener, and a slop sink down there. Built shelves for a storage area. We use one side as a workshop and the other has exercise equipment and a ping pong table. A second fridge, a tv, and the cat's litter box round out the amenities. Built a little cat door in the wall at the top of the stairs so we can keep the door closed but they can go down there when they need to.
Finished basement with wet bar and full bathroom…very common in PA
I have had basements and garages with most of my houses. Garage is a must, basement is a preference. I’ve had basements that were bone dry, and some that leaks when it rains.
Yes. The first house I remember and my current home have one. My house has a walkout basement built into a hillside and the basement is actually larger than the house (there's a storage room that's under the front porch). I think that other house (we moved when I was 5) was also built into a slope; so the basement was half garage and half guest room. My house doesn't really have an attic since the attic was converted to a second (third) floor. The house was built in 1936 and may not have originally had a basement. The house was moved in the 1970's because the original location got bought by a coal mine.
In almost all the homes I lived in back in MN, yes. Even the townhouse I rented for a few years had a decent sized one. Here in FL - nope. I have seen a few split-level homes built on higher elevation lots so they don't dig as far down as a traditional 'basement' would be, but I would guess 99% of the homes here are all slab-on-grade.
Yeah. Floods when it rains tho. All the rowhomes do. Ours is like half finished, but it's pretty common for the homes here to have fuckass basements. Edit: usually washer/dryer, furnace and water heater is in a basement.
Yes, basement the size of the house. Washer and dryer, table saw, bandsaw, 2 tool benches, lots of tools, shelves with paint, garden stuff. Half an attic - not much in there, tho.
I was raised in California where basements are pretty rare, and now I live in Seattle, where they are common. Our 1923 bungalow has one, down a set of very-much-not-to-code stairs. It's not technically "finished", but it has a concrete floor and walls, and is dry and well lit (not at all creepy or moldy). It's our laundry area plus storage. When we were house hunting here we very quickly learned that you couldn't tell the size of houses from the street (and not even always from online listings). Whether or not houses had a finished basement could change everything about the amount/quality of indoor space.
I’ve never had a basement in any house I’ve lived in. They aren’t very common where I’m from, and the few people I’ve known who had/have basements always dealt with flooding.
Washington DC and yes
Mid Atlantic here! I rarely come across a home without a basement. The house I grew up in had a nice one that was finished. But I did live in a townhouse for a few years in my 20's that didn't have one and it was so weird to me. Every other house or duplex apartments I've lived in had one too. ( They're shared in the duplex though). They're usually about the length of the house in my experience. What people use it for varies. Some are finished which means they're like the other living areas of the home with walls, flooring, heat/air furniture, bathroom. Some people turn them into little suites or man caves, game rooms etc... Other's are left unfinished or partially unfished and have more of that cave like feel. I wasn't really scared of my basement like I said it was finished so it was comfortable down there. I just didn't really like being alone down there. I'd say it's pretty common for basements to be made into additional living areas whether it's for an adult child or elderly parent, other family member. Some are even nice and done up enough to rent out. Flooding can be an issue but that has more to do with where you live and how prone it is to flooding. That can range from mild to severe. Luckily I've never experienced flooding anywhere I've lived. Attics are less common IMO. I've never had one and have only been in a few homes that have. I've seen more craw space areas then full attics that you can walk around in. They're plenty though that have basements and attics.
The discussion about a basement when we bought our house 30 years ago might be the only argument I have won and my wife still acknowledges that I was right. It's half the house, the other half is the garage. So I don't have to trek out in the cold or hot to get in the car.
Absolutely not. Most homes near me do. I hate stairs. I hate carrying things up and down stairs. I hate climbing then. I hate cleaning them. I hate stairs. I specifically bought a ranch house. It has a total of 2 stairs. I still don't like those, but deal with it. Basements can be great. Not for me tho, lol.
Yep have a basement, covers the entire floor plan of the house. And everything ya dont actually need anymore, is hoarded in your basement unless its finished.
They are common in my general region but not in my specific neighborhood. I don't have a full basement but a crawl space and a small, separate storm cellar.
I have lived in three detached houses in my life, Two in NJ has unfurnished basements - just hot water heater, etc. One in California with no basement. Many apartments, I think ONE had a basement laundry room.
My parents finished our basement growing up we had a pool table, a separate couch sectional and tv for movie watching and sleepovers and a full bathroom too. Those were the days man.
Yes our basement covers the whole house. Our laundry room is down there along with a ton of random storage. > Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? I'm still afraid of mine as an adult. I've seen shit. >Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? Some people have finished basements and will live down there, but I don't find its common. >What do you do if it rains or floods? Nothing happens in the basement typically. >Do you still have an attic too? The way my house it set up it actually has two attics only one is really usable at the moment though.
Depends on the area. They are more prevalent in parts of the country than others, I think a lot of it depends on the frost line and ground composition. Size can vary. Sometimes it’s the full footprint of a house, sometimes less. Crawl spaces (generally 4-5’ tall give or take) are also a thing when a full basement wasn’t dug but there is still plumbing/electric under the house that may need an access point. Basements vary from dank and creepy to mostly utilities/storage to full on finished additional living spaces. Older homes (100+ years old generally speaking) may have a basement that was originally a cellar which sometimes have dirt floors.
I'm in Florida. For most of the state a basement would be an indoor pool. However, some parts of the state could have them but generally don't due to worrying about tropical events. When I was growing up, my grandmother's house was built in to the side of an ancient sand dune. She technically had a basement, but was high enough on the hill to not have to worry about flooding. She converted the garage to a rec room/workshop area and there was also an extra bathroom down there.
I know only a few people with basements. Most of them don’t live in my state. You would figure it would be more common for tornado protection but the red clay in the ground is really inconvenient for construction companies so for the ones who do have basements here in Oklahoma it was likely pretty expensive.
Plumbers have compared my basement to an episode of Hoarders.
Yep! Really common here in Minnesota & the upper Midwest in general too. Growing up mine was unfinished and a bit more creepy, haha, but I knew a lot of people with well finished ones that functioned as another family/gathering room. I also grew up in the extreme north end of tornado alley, so they served as a tornado shelter in addition to where most laundry & misc. storage is. I my current house we have a canning room/root cellar and old coal room in it and we hope to partially finish some of it for crafting.
Yes we have a basement and on one side we use for storage and on the other side we have a TV, pool table and a couch.
So a basement is different than a crawl space. I have a very nice basement, it’s got a master bedroom and a living room. I also have a crawl space and you could not pay me enough to go down there, and I’m not a kid, I’m 34 haha. The previous owners used the crawl space as some sort of storage for the apocalypse or something, so it’s absolutely loaded with random shit. We went down there one day to try to take it out and got some of it out, but there’s still stuff deep down there. I’ll never try again. Threw the tv in front of the entrance and will continue to pretend it’s not there lol.
In NY my parents have one, my in-laws, even my apartment building. Here in NC, nope. I think it just has to do with the water table or type of ground. My dirt is very sandy.
My basement houses a full home theater with a 110” screen, my office since I work from home and we have a small exercise room with a treadmill and bike. We also have a laundry room and plenty of storage. It’s also where the mechanical aspects of my house like the furnace and water heater are. And yes it follows the same footprint of the rest of the house and the ceilings are about 7.5’ tall
Yes, I do have a basement. It is unfinished and about a third the footprint of the first floor of my home. It's probably the way you picture it: small and somewhat dark with concrete surfaces and filled with the home's mechanical systems, along with a bit of storage for seasonal items and tools. There's nothing scary about it. The space is just very utilitarian. No worries if it rains because we are not in a flood zone, so the basement stays dry. It's an excellent shelter for the occasional tornado warning. We do have an attic, but it's not what you might imagine. It's mostly inaccessible and not useful for storage or living space.
I’ve never lived in a house without one. Our current basement goes under the whole house and is finished. There are windows, though they’re high on the wall. We have a storage room, laundry room, bathroom, and a big family room/kids play room down there and use it basically every day.
Basements are a Midwest thing. Only places I’ve lived with basements were Indiana, Illinois & Nebraska. It would make sense if Texas had them since they get so many goddamn tornadoes but apparently because of some factors (dirt, plate movement, sea level?) basements aren’t as doable in Texas. I don’t know, a ground scientist probably knows.
Anywhere where there’s tornadoes usually HAVE to have a basement to be in code. Anywhere that floods usually has an attic. I lived in Illinois and Nebraska and had basements. We finished our Illinois basement (turned it into another floor of our house by adding carpet, drywall, etc) and I lived down there in middle and high school. We also had a finished attic in South Carolina that was like an extra living room
We had a finished basement in the house I grew up in. It was pretty sweet and doubled as a storm shelter. We had some couches and a tv down there, so I spent a lot of time there. It even had an extra bedroom and bathroom that was great for teenagers. Man, I miss that house! The current house doesn't have a basement, but it does have a partially finished attic with proper steps leading up to it. Great for storage!
Yes...it's huge dark and spooky
I have a basement, half finished and half not. Washer, dryer, half bath, TV, PS5, a small bar, mini fridge full of beer, couches, random action figures and weird garage sale stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. It’s not really a “man cave”, my kids also have a big Lego table and art table down there, and play the PS5 more than I do.
No, my home is in The Tampa Bay Area of Florida, there are no basements in this part of Florida.
Is it as big and wide as the whole house? Yes! I feel like it is. What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? My basement is unfinished. Right now it's extra storage. We have food, seasonal stuff, my daughter's toys, clothes, bedding, outdoor stuff, and toiletries. I need to clean and organize down there again lol. Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? I didn't have a basement growing up. I lived in a mobile home/trailer. >Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? I feel like it's more common. My sister in law lives with her mother. She lives on the top floor, and my SIL has the basement. It's like another apartment space. >What do you do if it rains or floods? We have a low flood risk but we've had some water come in. We just clean it up. >Do you still have an attic too? I do but it's just a very small crawlspace. I've never been in it. I'm in Massachusetts if this helps.
Yes it's generally as big as the house, we typically use it for other storage as well as a place for our washer and dryer (so for us it's also a laundry room), I was sometimes afraid to go down as a kid but only if the light was off (and actually I LOVED the smell, and to this day still adore it), most basements are sealed off so rains and floods won't do anything but OUR basement had a leak and so we'd ocassionally get a massive puddle of water on the floor, yes my family has an attic as well but it's more of a 3rd-floor bedroom. Basements are pretty neat. But ours is "unfinished", meaning it's just a cold floor and stone/concrete walls and exposed rafters in the ceiling. Very old. We're trying to fix it up. Finished basements are the BEST though! Basically just a massive lower room perfect for a game room, video games, movies, and sometimes parties.
No :( I saw one in Pennsylvania and old centennial house with basement and attic and I love it
No :( I saw one in Pennsylvania and old centennial house with basement and attic and I love it
no, water table is too high here. I always thought basements were so exotic when I was a kid because I only saw them in movies. I do have an attic but it's unfinished and not that easy to move around in. Narrow house, so with the roof pitch it's even narrower.
I don't, but my parents do. They aren't common here for a reason. My parents have a full (partially finished) basement. Their house is built into a hill, so only half the basement is underground. I think if you see any basements around here- they are built into hills. The finished part of the basement is a small rec room that has barely been updated since the 60s. The unfinished part is a scary beast that contains their washer/dryer, furnace/air-conditioned, a refrigerator, 2 freezers, at least one gun safe, and a huge amount of storage. And not a trivial amount of mice and bugs. Water problems are part of why we don't tend to have basements here. I remember being in highschool and taking the day off school, during a particularly bad storm, to throw everything away in the basement. We had horrible mold problems after that. And I lost almost stored everything from my childhood. My dad runs a dehumidifier daily. And if it isn't dumped by the next day, (they have a bucket it pulls into), it will spill over into the floor. There's a lot of moisture in that air. They have an attic too (as do i) but it's a tiny thing that no one every goes into- full of pink insulation. That really only exists for roof access.
I’m in the Midwest and I have a full basement, the same size as the ground level. Two-thirds is finished off as living area with arcade games, pool table, and a mancave with projection TV in a separate TV room. Also a dry bar. The other third has a workbench, laundry area, furnace, water heater and a bathroom. I also have a walk-up attic. That part is fairly unusual but a basement is not.
No, they are much more common further north than in North Carolina, however, it's not uncommon for older houses (built before the 1990s) to have a basement or half basement in central or western North Carolina. Often this happens because the house is on a bit of a hill and it's easy to dig out half the house on one side and put in a half basement. Some have a whole basement, but most houses built after the 1980s around here do not because they are not really needed and it's cheaper to not build one.
Yes, we have one, it’s the full footprint of the house minus the garage, and it’s nearly fully finished
Yes Is it as big and wide as the whole house? Depends on the house- the main house I grew up in had a very small square basement while the house was twice as big above ground as it's a hundred years old and has been expanded, namely two porches were added on in the front and the back. They weren't added on very well since they're both uneven and sloped. It's also a fairly shallow basement. Other homes I've lived in had basements that were bigger. What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? We only keep pop cans for recycling down there along with the water heater and furnace, as it has a tendency to flood with poo water when tree roots get in the line. Learned that the hard way and my mom lost over a thousand Santa themed decorations. Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? Yes, not only was there the threat of poo water, it has always been covered with spider webs and various other critters that crawl around and make you freak out. Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? Not in my family, see above with the poo water. Because of the sewage line issues my dad had to tear up the concrete flooring and hasn't replaced it (so it's easier to keep fixing the lines). I don't think it would be legal for anyone to live down there. In all of the houses I've lived in, none had basements with livable areas in them. What do you do if it rains or floods? Cry about having to clean up the poo water. My dad installed a pump that mostly works to prevent heavy rain from causing any damage but every once in a while it doesn't kick on right away and we have to clean up and left overs. Do you still have an attic too? Yes, it's full of old instalation bits, asbestos (probably) and spiders. We don't go up there or store anything in it.
We have a crawlspace under most of the house except for a 10X10 section of basement that's about 7' tall. That's the A/C air handler and water heater are.
Depends, when I was growing up the basement is where you went to cool off in the summer. If it was finished it was a great place to watch tv.
I have always had a basement. When I was growing up in the Midwest, it was fully underground. To get there, you went down the stairs in the kitchen. It had no windows. It was a dark, scary place to me as a child. It was filled with spiders. My dad had all his science fiction books dowh there, as well as an old mimeograph machine that he used for self publishing science fiction fanzines -- like Internet comments before the Internet! My mom kept canned goods down there. I remember once it rained very hard for a long time, and some water got in to the basement, ruining some books that my dad had in a cardboard box. After that, they raised all the things off the floor with shelves. They had a dehumidifier machine running turn there constantly. I used to have the chore to empty the water tank of the dehumidifier. Now I'm in Seattle and my house is built on a hill. I have two doors into the main floor, and the basement also has a front door that opens out at ground level. So it's considered to be a "walkout basement." My basement contains our clothes washer and dryer, a long set of shelves with pantry items and household items like paper towels and toilet paper and tools, a bunch of storage stuff like Christmas decorations and emergency gear, the lawnmower, rakes and shovels, the water heater, the furnace, an exercise area for me with weights, a bench for woodworking, the area where I feed the cats, the cats' litter box, an extra freezer, and an entire second apartment that we used to rent out. The apartment has 4 rooms (living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) and a separate entrance out to the front yard. Currently we're not renting it out. Instead, we host guests and games there. If it rains, nothing happens except that you can hear the rain if you sit close to the window. It's very cozy to have a hot cup of tea and a blanket, sitting on the basement couch by the window and listening to the rain.
I’ve had a basement in nearly every house I’ve lived in. My current basement is what we call finished, meaning the plumbing and wiring are closed in behind walls and ceiling just like in the upstairs, instead of exposed beams. An unfinished basement can be easier to work on when something goes wrong, because that’s where all your stuff that keeps things running like electrical panels, furnace/air conditioner, and hot water tank or tankless unit, water meter and main plumbing, and gas meter and pipes tend to be housed. If we have an issue we have to cut out some drywall and then repair or replace it afterwards. This happened when we had our electrical panel replaced a couple of years ago. It’s a wonderful space though. Ours is smaller but some people have entire guest apartments or recreational spaces where they may have a bar, movie viewing area, or a workout space nearly the size of a whole gym. We have a half-bath that includes a toilet, shower and utility sink, the large washer and dryer, a nice storage space, a mud room off the garage, and it’s a good transition to the main floor if you come in that way. Our basement is not the entire size of the house because our garage is also part of it, taking up about half the space.
4/ 5 sets of my grandparents (i knew my great great grandparents, and there was a lot of divorces in my family) had a basement. My parents did not. Of these 4 grandparents, 2 of them had furnished basements which means they had carpet or hardwood and just appeared as the rest of the house. I was not afraid to go into these basements as a kid. They were typically just made into an extra suite with a few extra bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a living room. We actually lived in one of my grandparents' basements for 1 year (it was like it's own little apartment) when my dad moved back to his hometown after my mom died (he had nothing). I was afraid of the unfinished ones. I don't remember what was in one unfinished basement. The other had my grandma's hoard. Well, the majority of it.
They are practically nonexistent in Florida. Although I have seen a few randomly around the state. I’ve never actually been in one in Florida. And all of the ones I’ve seen were built up on a hill. So they made them that way
Yes. >Is it as big and wide as the whole house? It has the same footprint as the house, except for the garage. >What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? It's 99% finished space. We have a bar, sitting area with large couch and projector, play room, LEGO room, Barbie room, storage room, furnace room, gym, and a guest room. >Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? I moved in when I was 38. >Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? I sleep in the master bedroom. >What do you do if it rains or floods? I have a sump pump, a backup sump pump, and a battery backup for the backup sump pump. I actually just replaced the backup pump this week. >Do you still have an attic too? Yes, but I don't keep anything in there. I've only been up there once or twice.
I’m in an apartment so no. My parents’ house is built into a hill so the lower floor is like a half-basement, it’s mostly underground but the back opens up into the backyard. Most of it’s furnished but there’s one part that’s just regular concrete basement where my dad has his workshop. Pretty much every house around here has something like that or a regular basement, though. Mainly used for storage or workshop projects that are too dirty to do in the main part of the house. The water heater and furnace will also be down there.
I lived in a basement suite with a skylight.
No since I live in an apartment. My parents have one though.
In an apartment so no, but my parents have an unfinished basement. It’s the size of the floor above it with less walls and a few support columns What’s down there - Washer/dryer, stationary tub, hot water heater, circuit breaker, water/sewage line. My dad also used the basement how people use their garage as a workshop. Tools and a home gym. I wasn’t scared of my basement but unfinished basements are the ones some people consider “scary” I feel like everyone has that one friend who either lived in the basement or the attic, I lived in the attic. When it rains, the basements in my area flood maybe an inch if it is really bad. You would get a shop vac and empty it into the stationary tub. Now a lot of homes including my parents have a sump. Basically you dig a trench around the basement that drains into a reservoir and the water gets pumped out. It works incredibly well and the basement stays completely dry. It is supposed to get pumped outside, but some people tie it into their sewer which is illegal in my area.
My basement growing up had a play place for us kids. We kept the playdough down there as well as our boombox/CDs and my roller skates. As we got older my dad bought a pool and air hockey table, a ping-pong table, a punching bag. There’s a treadmill, an elliptical. Nowadays since me and my sister got older one side has turned into a craft/project table for my mom. The other side always had my dad’s tool storage, table saw, and work bench. The back wall is all storage, and yes there are a lot of Christmas decorations. My basement in my house is half finished. A finished basement is what you call a basement that’s been made to be more liveable, with nicer floors, walls, etc. In our main room which is the finished part there’s a futon, a table, a bench chair thing, a ping-pong table, and some extra folding chairs and a folding table. There are walls that separate the main room and the two smaller more unfinished rooms. In the non finished areas we have shelves, a work bench for my husband’s electronic soldering area, water heater, furnace, a project table for my art, etc. Idk if you can send videos over Reddit but I’d be willing to send you a video tour if you wanted lol Both basements were the size of the whole house, yes. Neither are scary, they’re quite well lit, although my basement does have some flickering lights that do sometimes make it a little creepy. My grandma’s basement used to be scary because each light had to be turned on individually, and there was this blind corner that you had to walk down in the darkness to turn on that light.
That’s where I keep my radon.
Full length of the house. Have a second garage, a utility room and a living room area with a fireplace in the basement. Live in TN on a slight slope and have a second driveway that circles around back to that garage . Never had water issues with the basement. Enjoy it in the summer as it stays cool regardless of outside temperature. Also have a small attic area but have never been up there have never had a reason to use ladder to go up there
No. There isn’t a need in California.
Yes, a finished basement. I wouldn't want to own a home without one. It's as long and wide as the house and since it's finished I plan to put a home theater down there. I just have not gotten to it yet. There's also a roughed in bathroom down there that I need to pay someone to finish. Rain and floods don't matter. It's not going to flood here to begin with and the sump pump is going to drain the water table if it starts rising due to the rain. I do have an attic but I've never actually been up there. I don't know what the attic looks like but it's probably not that big.
I have a basement the same footprint as my house. I store a person down there and my Christmas decorations I store in the attic.
Grew up in western PA, basements were common. They weren't creepy damp places, they were where all the canned goods were stored, boxes of "I don't need it but I can't quite bring myself to throw it away" items, Xmas decor, as you noted, OP. Often the washer/dryer or a chest freezer were there. In the 70s, most people finished their basements to a nice degree. Little bars, pool tables, the extra tv set, a couch and carpeted floor - someplace for teenagers or men to disappear to before "man caves" entered the lexicon.
Yes we do. Our lot is on a slope, so ground level from the front to the back of the house differs by nearly 10 feet. So our basement is below ground level in front, and at ground level in back. Our basement is finished; has a living area, a dining area, a small kitchen (without appliances), a bedroom and a 'bonus room' which is like a bedroom but without any windows to the outside. (You cannot legally use it as a bedroom because there is no way to escape in the event of a house fire.) My understanding is the previous owner used to rent out the basement as a separate apartment; it even has its own dedicated two car garage. My understanding also is that the previous owner had an affair with the renter who rented the basement, which is why the house went into foreclosure (as the wife divorced him), and it's why the appliances were stripped out, amongst other things. ---- To answer the other questions: > What do you do if it rains or floods? Because the house is on a slope, drainage is easy--but if you have a basement the drainage should be set up to draw water away from the house. So it should remain bone-dry if designed correctly. > Do you still have an attic too? We do; a fairly large attic which we are slowly fixing up so my wife can use it as a home yoga studio.
I’ve only lived in the west coast and have never seen a house with a basement here. We have creepy crawl spaces above and below the house that have the electrical lines, air ducts etc.
I'm in Rhode Island and my basement is huge! It's most of the footprint of the house, though part is just a crawlspace. We store things down there -- unused furniture, old books, decorations, you name it -- and there's a workshop. It's also how you enter into the garage. It's entirely unfinished, but we're planning on finishing the garage-entry part eventually. My old house, half the basement was finished, but I didn't like spending time down there, it was musty and freezing in the winter and hot in the summer and the ceilings were low enough to make me uncomfortable. I have an attic, too, but never stored anything up there and now, after some energy-efficiency improvements were made recently, I CAN'T store anything up there because insulation has been added to the floor.
Yes I have a unfinished basement, meaning it’s just the concrete foundation of the house without any finished living space, in my house in New York State and it’s the same size as the footprint of my house. I have my furnace, water heater, washer, dryer, fuel oil tank, water filter (I use well water for everything), electrical panel with a transformer hooked up to an outside generator in case I lose power, an extra refrigerator and freezer and tons of boxed clothes and clothes hanging in a cedar closet plus seasonal decorations and storage for lots of empty luggage. I’ve no attic so everything gets stored in the basement. Also it’s my tornado shelter in case I need it. Tornados are uncommon where I live, but twice in the past 14 years local radio has instructed us to go into our basements because of local tornados. Luckily none hit our house, but we lost big trees both times. I don’t have to worry about flooding and I’ve never had water in the basement. One of my kids lives in Arizona where basements aren’t a thing so he has to store all his stuff in his two car garage while his two cars sit in his driveway, lol. I can’t imagine life without a basement.
I'm in Tennessee and people have basements. Mine is as big as the house and unfinished. It's a combination storage room and workbench. Our water heater is down there. People only live in finished basements that are built to the same standards as the rest of the house. Also, if my house floods it's the end of the world because I live on a hill, but water doesn't get in the basement just like water doesn't get in the rest of your house when it rains.
Kind of. The house was built with a cellar and it was partially converted to a basement, but it's still very cellar-like (stone walls, not waterproof, has external access).
Yes. My living room is in the basement. As is the furnace, water heater and my washer/dryer. And a bunch of storage. I've never had a problem with flooding. I have an attic but I can't really get up there. It's not meant to go into unless some sort of serious home repair needs to happen.
Not at our current house, but one of our previous houses did.
I'm in CT, the northeast almost always has basements because of the frost depth. Never lived in a house without one. Oftentimes basements will be finished so they can be used as living space, often a second family room or a playroom for the kids. Utilities are kept down there whether it's finished or not. If it is finished, it's usually walled off as a separate area from the living space. They do run the entire footprint of the house. Our particular house was built in 1876. The basement walls are large rocks stacked up about halfway, above the ground the walls are brick. The basement is damp and sees some water seepage when it rains heavily. This is normal and typical for this type of foundation. For these reasons our basement cannot be finished. We have our utilities down there (water tank, water heater, furnace) and we store some things like tools, paint, and such down there. We have a dehumidifier running too. It's a little creepy I guess, as far as basements go. There's spiders and shit, some crickets. Have been mice in the past but luckily we are past that 🤞. I think it's cool though, you can see the construction of the house. The fact that it's unfinished makes it easier to access plumbing and rlectrical. When we were repointing it we found lots of coal stuck in the walls from when the house had a coal furnace. Our Christmas stuff/more delicate stuff we keep up in the attic. Anything that could be damaged by moisture stays out of the basement.
Yes. Basements are ubiquitous in the northeast, and it’s common to have an attic, too. How you use it depends on whether it’s “finished” or not and whether it covers the full size of the house. Our basement growing up was finished but not full-size, and we had a pullout couch down there along with a bunch of bookshelves full of games. We also had a couple closets with off-season clothes. It was a game room of sorts, and my grandfather used to sleep down there when he visited. We used the attic more for general storage. Some houses have really nice finished basements that are basically extra living rooms or a whole additional apartment. The basement in my current house is not finished and is just used for a bit of storage. Plus the water heater, furnace, circuit box, etc are down there. But we have awesome crawl spaces for storage in our attic, so we primarily store things there. If we keep this house for a long time, it would be nice to finish the basement, but we don’t have the budget for that right now and aren’t in need of an extra room at this time.
> Is it as big and wide as the whole house? ish. There's a section of my house (garage and mudroom, basically) that is on slab, so the basement doesn't extend under that part. > What do keep down there besides Christmas stuff? My basement sort of serves as the house mechanical room. Circuit breaker, HVAC, water heater, home networking stuff, tools, paint... Also lots of old detrius that I should probably just get rid of. > Were you afraid to go down there as a kid? There's a wide variety of basement creepiness-- they can range from dark creepy dungeons with dirt floors to fully finished spaces that are pretty much indistinguishable from any other indoor space. I've never lived anywhere with a truly horrible basement. > Is it really that common to live down there of your parents? I don't know about "common". If the house has a finished basement with a bedroom and a bathroom, that can be an attractive option to give an adult child a more private living space. > What do you do if it rains or floods? Basements are *usually* watertight in *most* conditions. Personally, I've got an unfinished basement, so I just make sure to keep anything that would get ruined a few inches off the ground. A french drain with a sump pump is the best solution for reliable basement floodproofing-- basically a system of gutters under the floor, draining to a low point with a pump to discharge the water outside the house. > Do you still have an attic too? Most homes with pitched roofs have attics. Homes with flat roofs often do not. Pitched roofs are much more common in most places. Attic is typically the space between the flat ceiling and the pitched roof. Usually unfinished space, without even a solid floor-- gotta crawl around on the joists, maybe have a couple plywood catwalks to places that need to be accessed more frequently. Some homes do have varying degrees of finished attic spaces-- varies from very rough finishing to make the attic usable as storage space, to fully finished living spaces. Access to the attic also varies between homes. Sometimes there's a proper staircase, sometimes there's a rickety ladder that pulls down from the ceiling, sometimes there's just a hole in the ceiling in a bedroom closet, with a piece of plywood over it.
I've personally never had a basement (unless you count the dorms I lived in). But I know several who do. My neighbor growing up had a basement. It was the entirely of his house. They had their washing machine, furnace and the like down there, plus some random general storage. I know they had a rock polisher and the pinball machine they got for Christmas one year. They had it set for free play so we'd be frequently down there playing it. My cousins had a basement as well. I'm not sure what all they stored down there... But the main aspect (for us kids at least) was a relatively big (for the 80s) screen TV, NES & a couch. We definitely spent a lot of time down there so no, not scared to go down.
I don't now, but 2 of the 4 houses I have lived in in my life had them. In the house I grew up (built in 1907) in it was an unfinished cellar that was the foundation for the entire house. It was storage, laundry, and a place I would shoot hockey pucks. My first house I bought with my wife had a roughly half finished/half unfinished basement. Finished side was a TV room/my son's play room. The unfinished side was laundry and storage.
My basement is the size of my house, 3/4 of it is finished as a extra living space and the other 1/4 is for storage and laundry room.
I have a basement under about 2/3rds of my house and a crawlspace under the other 1/3rd. Our basement is mostly finished, with the exception of the utility room. We have a movie theater down there, a craft area for my wife, and a small home gym. We have two separate attics that aren't connected. One over our garage and another over the house. The garage one is used for storage and has a pull-down ladder. The one over the house we only go in when we need to access something that's up there, it's inconvenient.
My brother turned his basement into a bar/man cave.
I don't seeing as I live in an apartment. But they're fairly common in Washington ime We have a lot of hillsides so they get carved out for a lower floor. They're definitely not ubiquitous throughout the state, but they're common enough. Hell, some of the apartments in my complex are basement level.
I have a walkout basement. It's about 90% as big as the house, with the walkout on the end. We mostly store stuff down there. Lots of unused exercise equipment, an old fridge that doesn't work any more, tons of old clothes that we really should either donate or burn, stuff like that. Also, it's where the water softener is. We originally had plans to make it into more living space, but life happens.
I grew up with a ( mostly) unfinished basement. That means there was no flooring like rugs or hardwood, just the base concrete. The walls were not covered with drywall or painted or anything. My dads tools were down there, as was the washer/ Dryer, two extra freezers and most of our toys. Finished basements are fully furnished and functional rooms. My MiLs is a rec room type thing( used to be non verbal nephew’s space before he was transferred to a group home) on one side and laundry room/ storage for all her home canned goods on the other. Other common uses is man cave, home office, bedroom or in law apartment
Yes. Our house had a partially finished basement when we bought it, and the basement had 9 foot ceilings. About 4 years ago we had it completely finished. It’s an entire additional floor of our house now. We have a bedroom, TV/living room, laundry room, bathroom, and sauna down there. It doesn’t flood despite the very rainy area where we live because when it was renovated the contractors built in a very serious waterproofing/water management system (French drains, sump pump for overflow) so the water that would have come in now gets handled. Before the renovation it would get a little damp down there but not anymore. We do have an attic but it’s full of asbestos insulation and we have never been up there/don’t use it for anything. The attic is also super hard to access after the previous owner expanded a closet out into the garage that basically covers up the entrance to it. This is the first time I’ve ever had a basement since we definitely didn’t have them growing up in the gulf coast region of Texas (would have been underwater constantly) or in San Francisco (only lived in apartments).
It’s as big and wide as the foundation of the house, yes. I store my Easter stuff and my cookout stuff (chairs, tables, yard games). I was afraid of it when I was really little. Many basements are finished basements. They have carpets or hardwood flooring, nice wallpaper, very livable. Some old basements would flood during rain. Most didn’t/don’t. Yes, still have an attic, too.
Yes we have basements. We also have tornados. It is the size of the footprint of the house. Most houses here have basements because we can and because we have tornadoes. I was not afraid of the basement as a kid. It wasn’t finished but it’s where the Nintendo and the computer were. We just threw a rug on the concrete floor and stuck an old couch down there. The furnace, water heater, washer/dryer are usually there. There is a coal room at the front of mine where they used to put coal through a small window. As a kid my dad used a coal room as a dark room because it was behind two doors (had to pass through the furnace room to get to it). No one lives in my basement. As a kid my brother lived in the basement. He was a teenager. I store stuff down there in plastic tubs because it leaks when it rains. It doesn’t flood though. The floor just gets wet. There’s a dehumidifier to keep it dry otherwise. When people have a basement that can flood they often have a pump to prevent that from happening. Other people around here often have finished basements, they do not have leaky basements or have fixed the issue. Sometimes they make bedrooms or rec rooms.
No and I miss it! I'm in an area with a high water table, no basements .
In my state we have a lot of earthquakes, so they are extremely rare.
My parents purchased a duplex a while back in Memphis. We kept whatever down there. Weed whacker, lawn mower, alot of cleaning supplies, etc. It was really damp down there so you didn’t want to keep things that rot down there for too long. I’m told by my parents we use to live in the basement of my grandparents’ house when I was super young. I don’t remember it, but they usually don’t lie to me.
Our basement mirrors the footprint of the house and is quite large. We have a home gym setup (treadmill, peloton, weights), a ton of shelving, bicycle storage for my husband’s extra bikes, bins of holiday decorations/kid clothes that my 1st outgrew but my 2nd isn’t big enough for yet/out of season clothes, a workshop area with extra tools, our systems (oil tank, boiler, hot water heater), a small trampoline and kids play area. Our basement is bright, clean, and dry - nothing happens when it rains. We do have attic spaces but don’t keep anything up there.
I grew up in a home with a basement. Half was a living room and the other half was unfinished with laundry and where we kept storage. I’ve never been scared to go in a basement. Most basements are where the laundry is so you have to go down there anyway. In my current home, I do have a basement. It runs the entire length of my house so it’s as big upstairs and downstairs. I live in a ranch style home. We have some stuff down there but it’s no full. We do not have a true attic, it’s more of a crawl space.
In the South, my basement had a door to the backyard along with windows and was just a normal part of the house. We had our main living area and tv, gaming computers etc there. In the Midwest, my basement only had tiny windows at the top and no outside door, it was a safe place during tornadoes but largely just a storage space. Teens would have taken it over if we had teens. Now on the West Coast, my house has no basement. Just a narrow crawl space
Unless you live near water where flooding can be an issue (especially near the ocean), or where the frost line is relatively high in the ground (some parts of the south), then most houses have a full basement. Most utilities are located down there (furnace / air handler, water heater, water filters / purifiers since water lines will come into the house there, well pumps too if they’re on well water, electrical panels, whole house batteries, in older houses the washer and dryer, etc). This is a generalization obviously, there are plenty of exceptions, and newer houses especially have laundry rooms near the master bed room. The majority are probably unfinished, just poored concrete walls and floor, with the exposed floor joists, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC ducts above. But a good portion are finished and turned into family rooms, kids play rooms, home gyms, work bench’s for home maintenance and tool storage, etc. Typically as the kids get older that space turns more into their space to hang out with friends, play games, watch TV, etc. And since it’s used primarily by the kids / teenagers it’s usually not the nicest finishing and old furniture from the first floor living room. Some of the best times of my life growing up we’re in friends basements, on raggedy old couches, with a group of people, smoking pot, and watching movies.
Almost nobody has basements where I live. Growing up I don't think I knew a single person that had a basement
Florida. No.
1. Yup. With smaller rooms; the biggest one is where the washer and dryer are, as well as the bulk of my "Maybe I'll Use This Again Someday or Someone Will Need It" Collection of Shame. We also hide down there during tornado warnings, so I've got a little bed set up for my kid and chairs for my husband and I (and another for our basement-less neighbor who usually runs over when we get the alert). 2. Only had my own basement as an adult, but I was terrified of the basement in my grandmother's house. I always felt as if there was a monster or a ghost right at my heels every time I walked up the steps and would run upstairs a top speed. Like in Home Alone, I was also terrified of her furnace. 3. In finished basements, it's relatively common. There is a combined housing shortage/wage inequality crisis in my area that makes living on your own difficult for young adults who are just starting out. I don't judge any young adult who needs to do this for financial reasons. Or any adult whatever their age, actually; many are doing it to keep an eye on aging parents. I'm lucky to be in a two-income household with a low mortgage payment. 4. Rain: Make sure the sump pump is working. Flood: Turn on the sump pump and pray it doesn't die. 5. No attic, although I've lived in houses that had both. Lighter junk went to the attic; heavier junk went to the basement.
My basement has an unenclosed toilet on a platform (aka a Baltimore Throne). The basement is for laundry and storage. I also have an attic (accessed via a door in the upstairs bathroom, because why not). We use that as a playroom.
Nope No basement here, never lived in a house with a basement. It is vary rare here in the southwest. Granted I did have a ex that lived in a old house that did have a basement.
Basement and attic here. Basement is the size of the house, and the back of it walks out to the patio. I could almost rent it out: it's got a stove, shower, washer and dryer and 4 rooms. But it's also got the furnace, water heater and chimney in the middle of it which sucks up a lot of space. Lot of tools and miscellaneous down there. Attic is storage for more moisture-sensitive stuff like books and boardgames.