Basements - Conneaut,OH

We have both in my house--we have an English basement (a daylight basement) that is below ground up to about my waist, and the rest is above ground. Down another flight of stairs we have a sub-basement that is fully below ground and unfinished.

There are SO many different kinds of basement out there!
My Mom's is below ground, has stairs and a few high windows.
She has a semi finished room down there but I wouldn't want to sleep there unless there were some sort of imminent tornado on the way.
I have seen some large below ground basements that were beautifully finished with several rooms with plenty of lights and they were very airy and comfortable.
My husbands Uncle has a walk out basement that's partially underground but it's built into a hillside so the back of it is open to the back yard, there are huge windows and several sliding glass doors.
It's completely finished, has it's own bathroom and it's almost like a complete apartment - it's beautiful!
It also has 2 bedrooms, a wet bar/entertaining area (near the pool table).
Our house has no basement - it has a crawl space.
Where we live we are too close to sea level and the ground is very sandy.
No one's house in this area has basements - which annoys my husband a bit.
We need to build a good size shed or a 2nd garage out back to take on some storage that a basement would have been handy for.

Some homes are designed and built mostly underground - they are beautiful and very energy efficient.

http://io9.com/look-beneath-the-surface-of-these-incredib...#

http://www.inspirationgreen.com/earth-sheltered-homes.html

Lilly:

I'm in DC. Basements here are a mixture. We don't have one like you are thinking of - it's our lower level and we have a 8' sliding glass door to exit to the back yard.

I have friends that do...ALL of them have TWO ways into the basement - one through the house and some walk-out to the backyard - whether double doors, sliding door, or casement doors - whatever.

ALL of the people I know who have basements are FULLY finished..they are rooms, play rooms, media rooms, with bathrooms, guest quarters, have mini kitchens, bars, etc.

Look at the home shows on House and Garden. Basements csn be really grand; better than many ground floor rooms.

It's my understanding in Oregon any way that the basement can only legally be used for a bedroom if they have egress windows.

I have an unfinished basement much as you described. I wouldn't have anyone sleep in it. I have my laundry, the furnace in it and use it for storage. My neighbors basement is like mine except it is open; free of things. His kids play down there. It's well lit and has furniture; older pieces replaced upstairs by new pieces. We do that a lot in the northwest. Msny family rooms are in the basement with usually a carpet on the floor and finished walls. Nothing fancy but very serviceable.

Some of the people I know have nicer finished basements than 1st floors.

Our basement is accessible by the garage and the stairs, and has a very nice family room, half bath, and laundry room.

My grandparent's basement is only accessible by the small staircase, but it has 3 bedrooms a huge rec room area, a full bath and a storage room. It's dark wood paneled, but it was built in the 60s and never updated. My great aunt has an awesome basement with a big bedroom, full bath, plenty of storage and a huge living room/bar area, which doesnt have windows but the bedroom and living room both open into the lawn/look out on the lake through sliding glass doors.

I'm from the Kansas, though, were we have to worry about tornadoes, so everyone has basements and if they're finished, they're usually nice ones. Until that big tornado in Oklahoma when they talked about not having basements on the news, I thought everyone did, I didn't realize it was a regional thing.

I live WAY up north! My house is a bi-level, so my basement isn't very deep. We have big windows (3x5ft) in each room that provide lots of light and an emergency escape route. The ceiling and walls are fully finished dry wall, with a wooden sub floor covered in wood laminate flooring. We have a bedroom, an office, a rec room, a bathroom and a laundry room in our basement.

I grew up in a bungalow and my bedroom as a child was in the basement. Our basement had six windows in front and six in back. They weren't big windows, but certainly big enough to climb through. The walls, ceiling and floors were also finished. We had two bedrooms, a rec room with a wet bar, a bathroom and a laundry room.

Most people where I live use their basements as living space and most basements have at least one or two extra bedrooms.

Ours isn't a walk out, but it has plenty of windows since our house is situated on a hill. It's almost like a main level area. But my dd doesn't like to be down there.

I'm in The Dallas area which has very few basement home options.

In my neighborhood.. ( rare for basements in this area) The basement is like a "daylight" area. Basically a pool is built along 3 walls and 1 wall faces outside with a door and windows.

They are not closed in basements that you see in the north areas.

The basement level usually has 1-3 bedrooms with a couple of baths and a kitchenette area , living area with fireplace. There is plenty access to the outside via a doorway .

The basements are not like many are in the north. Different concept based on our land areas and the shifting of land.

Our basement (split level house) is a finished basement with a family room, laundry room, bathroom, storage room, and two bedrooms. Our windows are a couple of inches above ground level, but ground level is about waist high. A lot of our neighbors have walk out basements which have patio doors that open out into a backyard patio.

The house I grew up in was similar to what you described (built in the 1920s). My parents had a bedroom down there, but they couldn't list is as a three bedroom when they sold it because by law basement bedrooms must have an exit other than the door going down into the basement. The people who own the house now have dug out part of the ground and put in larger windows so that it can be sold as a three or four bedroom house.

LOL my definition of a basement is similar to yours. In the house that I grew up in, the exit outside was a bulkhead so one would never have put a bedroom down there because that wasn't an easy means of egress. The basement in my last house (which was built in 1900) was straight out of Silence of the Lambs. It was so creepy that I wouldn't go down there at night. It had stone walls, the support beams running the length of the house were literally tree trunks, knots and all, the floor was technically cement but always had this weird, dirty coating on it, the house had 13 jack columns holding it up (which are supposed to be temporary supports), the pipes were all rusty, and the place was crawling with spiders in every nook and cranny. Shudder.

My current house was built in the 50's and the basement is clean, open and spacious. It is concrete with the small windows that you mentioned, but the exit outside is a set of stairs that go up to regular door (a "dog house" exit) so it's easy to get out. We did paint the walls and ceiling and carpet half of it, and then we had a carpenter build a bedroom with drywall, a ceiling, carpeting, etc. In that room we have two doors because the window is not a means of egress so in a fire, he would be able to get out from either side and either go out the back door or upstairs.

I have a lot of friends who have beautiful, finished basements where they've managed to put a regular door in either by doing what was done to my house or by trenching out the yard behind the house to put in a walk-out exit and/or full-size windows. To me, that's different than a split-level or raised ranch, which was designed to have a large portion of the lowest floor above ground.

we have a finished basement, with a rec room, and a bathroom with a shower. Our kids have a TV room in there, and we have a pool table too. We have nice comfortable furniture in there too. My teen boys opt to stay down there lots of times on the weekends. It's just like upstairs, no cold cement walls, except in the other part of our basement, where we have storage. Try googling finished basement images, and I'm sure you would be shocked at how beautiful some people's basements are.

My last house had a walk out basement with a double glass slider. Still wouldn't put my five year old there. My current basement is unfinished and you have to walk outside the house and around to get into it.

Building codes for bedrooms in a basement say they must have a window for escape. Older basements that have established bedrooms may not have windows but newer construction requires them.

They usually are like a half circle cut into the ground. They have a gravel bottom for drainage and solid walls a person can climb up.

I'll post a link to the ones I want when I eventually get to build a basement.

http://www.google.com/imgres?sa=X&espv=210&es_sm=...

http://www.google.com/imgres?sa=X&espv=210&es_sm=...

The basement at my moms and grandparents are half underground there are doors that lled outside the one in my house is only available by the stairs

We have about 5 stairs to get to our backyard from the basement - it has a double sliding door and plenty of light. We don't have any full windows, but we have several smaller windows.

Our basement is finished and nice. I would absolutely put a kid down there in the future. My kids are 6, 8, and 10 now and no way would I put one of them down there now. But yes, our finished basement is no different from any other level of our home (except that the bathroom is not yet finished).