Basements

[W2R]

Building a basement first, moving in, and then building the rest of the house on top while living there, is something I had never heard of. How interesting!

I wonder, but my first thoughts are that it has the potential to be a great tactic for those who want to avoid a mortgage and who are still working. You could use what would have been the 20% down payment for the mortgage, just to build the basement. Then move in, so that you can save the rent money. You could save as much as possible during the year, and use whatever you saved to build that much more onto your home when the weather is nice. After a few years you would have a home that is paid for, with no interest charges or rent having been paid.

It would have to be done in a location with no building codes, HOA's, and so on.

 

[ziggy29]

The 'basement first' thing was also done in the NE back in the '50s. There was one family that built the basement and moved in and liked it so much they completed it as a partly underground home.

Two words: Man Cave!

 

[CuppaJoe]

Building a basement first, moving in, and then building the rest of the house on top while living there,...
It would have to be done in a location with no building codes, HOA's, and so on.

Yes the area my parents moved to was a neighborhood built by hand by one guy who apparently wasn't restricted by building codes, didn't bother to figure where the lot lines were, and had no idea what a level is.

A kid I knew who grew up in a basement house later became mayor of a nearly town; wonder how he deals with codes. I've had reason to look into city building codes and it's the same story, very interesting to see how they get around and ignore the codes. I asked a friend if he had any trouble with city hall when he did a serious remodel, no, he just pulled some strings.

 

[freebird5825]

Building a basement first, moving in, and then building the rest of the house on top while living there, is something I had never heard of. How interesting!

I know of several in my area, but all now have upper floors built. I haven't seen a fresh one in a long time.

Another permutation of this idea is to buy some land, buy a cheap or used single wide trailer, have electric service run, dig your well, and live in the trailer while you build your house a few hundred feet away. When the house is done, move the electric service to the main house and sell the trailer. Or use it as an office for the tax break.

Life in the boondocks is interesting...

 

[ratface]

In the Chicago area every 20 years or so it seems that the basement is used to dispose of murdered bodies. The unfinished crawl space types are more suited to this type of activity. Seem to recall a movie where a little boy has encounters with a women buried in the basement which was filmed in Chicago. Even Hollywood recognizes the Chicago bsmt for its uniqueness.

 

[W2R]

In the Chicago area every 20 years or so it seems that the basement is used to dispose of murdered bodies. The unfinished crawl space types are more suited to this type of activity. Seem to recall a movie where a little boy has encounters with a women buried in the basement which was filmed in Chicago. Even Hollywood recognizes the Chicago bsmt for its uniqueness.

Wasn't that where Geraldo Rivera did the special on Al Capone's treasure (that didn't exist), digging in a basement? Seemed really creepy, wherever it was.

 

[calmloki]

We have a triplex with headknocker ceiling for anyone over 6'2". Have laundry machines and water heaters down there and it's really nice seeing most of the drain and supply line plumbing out in the open and accessible. It does get wet if we have serious damp times, so we have a sump pump. Only problem was once when it flooded maybe 3" - a tenant called to alert us to that, and as we were trying to figure out why the pump had failed she mentioned that she had unplugged something in that area that kept coming on and making noise - she could hear it in her apartment. Took her a minute or two to connect running pump = noise = dry basement vs not running pump = quiet = flooded basement.

MIL has a basement in the SoCal desert - nice and cool, when huge packages of TP and paper towels (she goes through an amazing amount of both) come back from Costco they just get dumped down the stairs till the next trip down, then arranged on shelves. Fun and very liberating to dump packages down stairs! At 94 she is now instructed NOT to go down there.

 

[ratface]

John Wayne Gacy, Jr., (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer. He was convicted and later executed for the rape and murder of 33 boys and young men, 29 of whom he buried in his crawl space under his house, between 1972 and his arrest in December 1978. He became notorious as the "Killer Clown" because of the many block parties he attended, entertaining children in a clown suit and makeup.


I'm thinking I'll never buy a house with a crawl space, bsmt might be ok. Anyway the movie I was thinking about was "Stir of Echos"

 

[W2R]

I'm thinking I'll never buy a house with a crawl space, bsmt might be ok. Anyway the movie I was thinking about was "Stir of Echos"

Gacy is fascinating, in a macabre sort of way.

My grandmother lived in a little house built in the 1890's, and it had a crawl space, I guess. Or maybe it was more like a cellar. You'd go in this little hole at the back of the house and it would get deeper the further you went until it was about five feet high. It was like a cave - - completely underground and the walls and floor were stone and mud. She had shelves and shelves of home canned vegetables and so on down there. When we would visit her, she'd give us kids a flashlight and send us under the house for a jar of home canned green beans or whatever. It was scary-fun. Not at all scary like John Wayne Gacy, though. More like in the sense of spiders.

 

[Khan]

Gacy is fascinating, in a macabre sort of way.

My grandmother lived in a little house built in the 1890's, and it had a crawl space, I guess. Or maybe it was more like a cellar. You'd go in this little hole at the back of the house and it would get deeper the further you went until it was about five feet high. It was like a cave - - completely underground and the walls and floor were stone and mud. She had shelves and shelves of home canned vegetables and so on down there. When we would visit her, she'd give us kids a flashlight and send us under the house for a jar of home canned green beans or whatever. It was scary-fun. Not at all scary like John Wayne Gacy, though. More like in the sense of spiders.

My opinion is either full basement or slab; never did grok crawl space.

 

[RunningBum]

Plastic sheeting on the ground is a good idea for a crawl space. It keeps the moisture down in the floor above the crawlspace.

 

[WhoDaresWins]

Buying a lot and building the basement first was not unheard of around here in western PA. Especially post-WWII when materials were harder to get and mortgages were something to be avoided, especially by immigrants and first generation Americans. The men worked in the mills and mines but wanted to move a little further out in what was then the country. They built the basement and the family moved in. The house was finished over time with their own labor or subcontracted to others who did the work as a second job. Rarely did the homes have a mortgage and the kids grew up on suburban plots and went to schools out of the urban centers. Some of them kept the habit of cooking and bathing in the basement so as to keep the upstairs a pristine showplace.

 

[Leonidas]

When I was a kid in St. Louis (before we moved to Hawaii) we had a huge, more or less unfinished basement. The main room was big, probably 40'x50' and mostly empty.

My Dad's family was from St. Louis and we lived there (U-City) for a while when I was really young. I remember the basement in the apartment house where a friend lived, and it was massive. We played rubber band gun wars in there all the time, and games of hide & seek had to start with a clarification if basements were out of bounds or not.

Most of the rest of my life has been somewhere without basements, although I knew some kids when I was living in Colorado whose home was a basement without a house on top of it. The "roof" was a concrete slab that stuck above ground level about a foot. Some small basement windows around the sides, and a door at normal level that opened to an enclosed staircase down to their "home" Weird house and a weird family - Mom didn't like me being over at their house too much at all.

Basements are impractical in Houston. Some people claim that there are some homes with basements here, but I've never seen one. I'd love to have the space for a rec room with a full sized pool table.

 

[Orchidflower]

Leonidas, don't know about all of Houston, but Bellaire is built on what they call "gumbo" which, to outsiders, means the soil is part dirt/part sand. A basement there would just cave in!

 

[Meadbh]

We had a basement in the first apartment we ever lived in and it was downright scary! I remember my mother asking my brother and I to go down there and get soda or other things she had stocked up on sale.....we would both go there together and then run up the stairs as fast as we could!
I don't want a house with a basement......I would be terrified.....that is where all the monsters and ax murderers hide for god's sake!

It is not for nothing that the French call it "le dongeon"!

 

[SarahW]

No basements in Houston for the most part; the water table is too high! My brother lives in Atlanta and has a very cool finished basement. Laundry room is on the main level, though.