Do you have a basement?

[tkd lisa]

The house we're in right now doesn't have one. But we just sold this one and are building a new one with a basement! It won't be finished though, since the house itself is taking all the money we are willing to spend.

The house I grew up in had one, which wasn't finished. It also had the garage down there, and the old carpeting. Great play room! But my mom wouldn't let me ride my bike in there.

 

[mbb]

High water table zones?

It's funny, here EVERYONE has a basement...sometimes developers have to blast through rock, or they just build the foundation around it.

It would be very unusual to find a home without one

 

[JVL1018]

I have a basement-it's sort of 2 parts-when the house was originally built, there was a 2 car garge at basement level-it ended up flooding due to the sloping driveway etc, so they walled it up and built another garage at street level.
So I use that garage(called "the old garage" by us LOL) for storage-we have *everything* in there and still plenty of room for more junk as we acquire it. ;o)
Besides that we have a big playroom for the kids, a large laundry room, a pantry and a small office/drum room.
If we were ever to move, a house without a basement would not even be in the running-it's a must have.
Especially when you have a husband who plays the drums.

 

[Jeafl]

Yes, we have a basement, although now that it's totally finished I prefer to call it the "lower level".

We have a large open space that will eventually house a pool table, another large space that has the workout equipment, another area with the furniture and TV and the smaller area with the coolest air hockey table I've ever seen. My absolute favorite part though is a 16 foot wide closet that is 5 feet deep. It has shelves on three walls for storage. We also have a large crawl space that is heated/air conditioned for storage, and a smaller closet that goes pretty far under the stairs for suitcases and stuff.

We also put in a full bathroom down there with a shower. That was an odyssey in itself because the plumbing wasn't roughed in when we built the house.

 

[crz4mm2]

We have a basement. It is not finished and is rather icky. The people that sold us the house (it is a very old house) told us the basement was 'dry' and it was not! We spent 5500 bucks trying to make it dry. Still gets moist down there I would love to have a full finished basement that didn't get wet...

 

[monarchsfan16]

We have a basement. It's finished to the extent of having sheet rock on the walls. So it's not really finished. We have our laundry stuff down there, fooseball table, air hockey table, 2nd freezer, and a whole lot of junk. It's sort of 4 different rooms. We store all the pool toys and patio furniture down there. Of course the basement floods pretty often, so...there's plenty of mold down there too

 

[Shelby5514]

Our basement is 90% finished. The unfinished parts are where all the utilites are. We have a theater room, office, 1/2 bath and a Christmas storage room that are all finished. We don't spend much time in our basement until the winter. It seems to be warmer there. In the summer its used only for movie parties and a tornado shelter!

 

[Alice28]

Yes, we have an unfinished basement. Basements aren't as common here on the west coast (esp in California where I grew up- hardly anyone had a basement, unless their house was super old, which again, was uncommon). The floor is just dirt with some plastic sheeting on it and the walls are unfinished...in fact we have a stone/rock foundation, not concrete (our house is 106 years old), so it's interesting to see our nice old house being supported by rocks (Bible verse anyone???). The water heater and furnace are down there, and my dad built some shelving that goes around most of the perimeter, so we store Christmas items, some of DH's military stuff, tools, paint, etc. We don't have a garage (again, old house...didn't have garages for cars in 1898), so it's our main storage area. I like it- I think it's cool and would love to have it finished someday so we could have a rec room.

 

[NMAmy]

Yep, we have a finished basement. One area is a family room area with tv, futon bunkbed, couch, recliner and my favorite--a gas fireplace! I've never had one in a basement before and I love that.

Another area is Dh's home office. The third area is storage and laundry room. The storage has built-in shelves - one side for pantry type items, the other with bigger, deeper shelves for...well, mainly junk. I also have a cedar lined closet in there and a room under the stairs for storage that scares me. It reminds me of that old movie, "Cellar Dwellers."

It's all carpeted except for dh's office which has a ceramic tile floor. We love our basement!