@spitfire6006006 If D&D is for Dungeons and Dragons then my husband, cousin-in-law, two nieces and nephew would love you. They still get together and play when life allows it.
@ruouttaurmind No shit, I so miss a basement. But where I live, unless you want an indoor wading pool, you live with a crawl space. So much I could do with a basement.
Live in Florida so if we dig 5 feet down, we strike water. No way to have a basement here unless you create a huge mound. If you go that far, you may as well just create a two-story house.
Live in an 1870’s farm house that had a well in the basement, rocks make up the walls and there is cement on the floor but every time it rains all the water runs down the hill in my back yard on threw basement… so all and all we don’t store things down there or they get moldy
Another Floridian here with the problem that a basement turns into a swimming pool. I’m completely jealous when I see home remodel shows where they have these fantastic basements that are pretty much the size of my entire house. I wish.
I live in an 1832 stone church converted into a house. I think the guy who converted it in the 1970s had a smallish hole dug under it at that time to put in the heating, etc. At least that’s what it looks like. A hole in the ground that you enter from the outside. The spiders are in charge, which means the trip from the entrance to the light switch is kinda like that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I miss having a basement. On the other hand, I have a belfry with a real bell in it. That rings. And 4 entirely separate attics, three of which are very difficult to find. The dehumidifier is not for the cellar. That would be like trying to dehumidify the ground. It is for a bedroom on the ground floor on the shady side of the house, which sometimes feels a little like a finished basement because of those 2-foot thick stone walls. It gets a little damp in there.
Now I really want a belfry with a genuine actual bell! Do you ever ring it just for fun? Oh, my neighborhood would hate me real quick if I had my very own belfry with a genuine actual bell…
@ruouttaurmind, I ring it when I have guests. Also last summer when a woodpecker took up residence in the belfry I ran inside and rang it hard every time I heard her pecking from there. Boy was that effective.
Also last summer when a woodpecker took up residence in the belfry I ran inside and rang it hard every time I heard her pecking from there.
LOVE IT! HA!!! Extra stars for you!
Here in the desert we have Gila woodpeckers. They’re quite fond of pecking on the sheet metal of HVAC units on the roof. It doesn’t cause any damage, but that loud pecking echoing in the HVAC vents throughout the house is annoying as hell at 4:30AM on a school night!
@alisonacase It’s everyone’s dream house. And you have your own theme song, ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree’. “But Alice … she lives in the church nearby the Restaurant, in the bell tower with her husband Ray and Facha, the dog. And livin’ in the bell tower like that, they got a lot of room downstairs
Where the pews used to be…”
Finished basement now split in half. One side is now my teenagers get away space. The other side is for my husband and his rowdy friends. Put in another bathroom so they don’t have to climb the stairs when drunk. If they are too intoxicated we have a bed built into the shelving section so they can sleep it off as well as an old sleeper sofa if there is more than one. Between our two professions we will not allow them to leave if they don’t have a designated driver. Nothing is funnier than seeing two grown men drunk and spooning each other while sleeping off their alcoholic buzz. Sounds gross- and it is- but still funny none the less. It also works well if my son has people sleeping over.
@WTFsunshine my friend made this into a meme, but these are real people that we really know at a party we were really at. about half of us don’t have any stopping power (like she and i) while the rest of us are comprised of people that don’t drink, people that are too old for this shit, and/or people that drank too much too early and passed out, resulting in this kind of scene with some frequency.
Our house was built in 1900 so it’s a cellar and not a basement. It used to flood every time it would rain. I’ve been working to get the water away from the house (previous owners had downspouts directed right onto the foundation - sigh). Our dehumidifier down there turns on less and less.
I’m tempted to take a picture because my husband and son made an awesome basement room out of nothing, but it would kind of be a violation of his privacy. It’s kinda cool and minimalist
Ours is finished to the point where it has concrete flooring and we sealed the walls with Kilz. A small amount of water still comes in at the edges of the floor, so we have a dehumidifer already down there and everything is on shelves. Eventually we’d like to hopefully fix the water issue and completely finish it.
@Avalora Make sure the ground around the home is sloped away from the house & the roof is draining away (and downslope) from your house.
Hopefully, they sealed the basement wall outside especially the cold joint at the base of the wall, and put drain pipes & rock in…
i live in an apartment, and there is a basement that we have access to…but i’ve never been in it. i’ve seen a bit of it from outside but just no reason to go down there.
parents live in a raised ranch like everyone else i knew growing up and everyone had like a half finished basement. my dad has a den, i had a playroom, then there’s unfinished bits like the hallway, laundry/storage room, and a space that’s kind of like a pantry that was supposed to be a second bathroom but sadly never got made into one. all nice and cool in the summer, but very cold in the winter, and damp, with a couple corners that get sopping when it rains too much. it’s definitely not like the finished basements you see on hgtv.
@Kidsandliz well yeah, any place could be worse than it looks on the outside, i just meant that around here ‘finished basement’ means something very different than what you see on tv and what people might consider ‘finished’ in other places.
What I need now is a good humidifier although I understand it is better to buy when an item is out of season, like the dehumidifier you offer today. So I guess I wait til next April or so to watch for one, right?
@infornography I live in west Texas. Basements here are very rare because under the thin veneer of topsoil there’s nothing but granite and clay. However I live on the side of the mountain, and split-level houses are very common n my neighborhood. So my house is one story from the front and two-story from the back. The downstairs room is developed fully and it’s a game, laundry and art room. At the back of it there’s a sloped dirt basement. The dirt basement is completely undeveloped, it has some wooden shelves in there but I don’t store anything on them. Too creepy spidery for me. It just provides access to the heater that’s in the floor of the living room.
@infornography North DFW here, no basements because the ground moves way too much…lots of Foundation repair companies. When we were shopping our realtor suggested that if we wanted a pool to buy a house next to one that had a pool…good chance at some point it would shift into our yard anyway.
@tightwad In Florida most houses are built on a slab because your basement would be a swimming pool, the water table is usually about 6ft down. When the phone company lays underground cable the have to pressurize the casing with nitrogen, there are all these nitrogen bottles chained to phone poles down there.
Nope. Built on a slab because, um, apparently the builders were too lazy to dig. Kind of messes with the temperature as it’s always way cooler downstairs. Great in the summer but it’s cold down there in the winter unless I crank the heat.
We have a very nice & fully finished daylight basement. It has 2 bedrooms (one converted to electronics workshop), full restroom, laundry, exercise area & huge “rec room” with my stereo turntable area with multiple recliners, gas fireplace & beer refrigerator .
We built the house in the 80’s.
@JoetatoChip Do they know you’re there or is this an “unofficial” living situation?
Back when I was in college, there was a kid who, as the story goes, failed out of school and didn’t want to tell his parents. He reportedly lived in the library and ate crackers, ketchup packets, and whatever else was out for free at the student center for at least a quarter. He was a strange one.
I have a hole in the ground that usta be a coal pit but the stairs rotted away at some point and they turned the cellar access into a hall closet and you access the cellar through a crawl space full of pit vipers and other creepy things.
We live in a floodway next to a small river at the bottom of a hill. We have a basement. We lost everything we had down there over the summer when we had seven feet of water down there for a week. We had a lot of stuff down there. Only one floor tile came up, so it’s more or less still finished.
Not finished, but not too dirty either, mostly boxes, laundry, and the D&D table
@spitfire6006006 If D&D is for Dungeons and Dragons then my husband, cousin-in-law, two nieces and nephew would love you. They still get together and play when life allows it.
Basements are extremely uncommon in my region. I would love to have one though. I’d turn it into a home theater/man cave.
@ruouttaurmind No shit, I so miss a basement. But where I live, unless you want an indoor wading pool, you live with a crawl space. So much I could do with a basement.
Live in Florida so if we dig 5 feet down, we strike water. No way to have a basement here unless you create a huge mound. If you go that far, you may as well just create a two-story house.
@cengland0 Seriously. You have to keep your pool filled all year round so it won’t float out of the hole.
@Mehrocco_Mole exactly. Makes it difficult to fix the marcite if you need to.
I occasionally have had my own private lake in the basement (when I’ve had one that is). Drowned a dehumidifier once that way.
@Kidsandliz seems like it didn’t do a very good job then
@flooners Yeah it needed a sump pump attached LOL
I live in Florida. We call them swimming pools here.
Crawl space. Mud, rocks, snakes.
The basement in my house was finished well by someone working in the mid seventies. Nice fireplace and lots of room for activities.
@melonscoop
Live in a floating home, so my basement is the Columbia River.
@captaincrunch don’t try to dehumidify that. It won’t work out.
Live in an 1870’s farm house that had a well in the basement, rocks make up the walls and there is cement on the floor but every time it rains all the water runs down the hill in my back yard on threw basement… so all and all we don’t store things down there or they get moldy
Another Floridian here with the problem that a basement turns into a swimming pool. I’m completely jealous when I see home remodel shows where they have these fantastic basements that are pretty much the size of my entire house. I wish.
@RiotDemon add a second floor and just call the first floor the basement!
You’re welcome.
It’s mostly slab-on-grade here in California. No frost line means no need to dig deep down for the foundation footings.
☝ what he said.
However, earthquakes and large tree roots.
@alphapeaches There are almost never earthquakes of any annoying magnitude.
Wrong soil here or something, so very few of them.
If I had one, I’d:
@f00l that’s a deeply unserious video
I live in an 1832 stone church converted into a house. I think the guy who converted it in the 1970s had a smallish hole dug under it at that time to put in the heating, etc. At least that’s what it looks like. A hole in the ground that you enter from the outside. The spiders are in charge, which means the trip from the entrance to the light switch is kinda like that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I miss having a basement. On the other hand, I have a belfry with a real bell in it. That rings. And 4 entirely separate attics, three of which are very difficult to find. The dehumidifier is not for the cellar. That would be like trying to dehumidify the ground. It is for a bedroom on the ground floor on the shady side of the house, which sometimes feels a little like a finished basement because of those 2-foot thick stone walls. It gets a little damp in there.
@alisonacase
Now that sounds amazing.
@alisonacase I’m with @f00l, that sounds positively fantastic!
Now I really want a belfry with a genuine actual bell! Do you ever ring it just for fun? Oh, my neighborhood would hate me real quick if I had my very own belfry with a genuine actual bell…
/image belfry
@alisonacase Very cool place. And yes, the internet is scary. I promise I won’t come visit.
@ruouttaurmind, I ring it when I have guests. Also last summer when a woodpecker took up residence in the belfry I ran inside and rang it hard every time I heard her pecking from there. Boy was that effective.
@cinoclav, sheeit. I need to be more careful.
@alisonacase
@alisonacase
LOVE IT! HA!!! Extra stars for you!
Here in the desert we have Gila woodpeckers. They’re quite fond of pecking on the sheet metal of HVAC units on the roof. It doesn’t cause any damage, but that loud pecking echoing in the HVAC vents throughout the house is annoying as hell at 4:30AM on a school night!
/image Gila woodpecker
@alisonacase It’s everyone’s dream house. And you have your own theme song, ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree’. “But Alice … she lives in the church nearby the Restaurant, in the bell tower with her husband Ray and Facha, the dog. And livin’ in the bell tower like that, they got a lot of room downstairs
Where the pews used to be…”
@ruouttaurmind I hate those bastards. They don’t have a roof AC unit to peck on at my house, so they go for the stucco.
@Dweezle They do that at my office. The landlord has to patch stucco two or three times a year.
/giphy woody woodpecker
Finished basement now split in half. One side is now my teenagers get away space. The other side is for my husband and his rowdy friends. Put in another bathroom so they don’t have to climb the stairs when drunk. If they are too intoxicated we have a bed built into the shelving section so they can sleep it off as well as an old sleeper sofa if there is more than one. Between our two professions we will not allow them to leave if they don’t have a designated driver. Nothing is funnier than seeing two grown men drunk and spooning each other while sleeping off their alcoholic buzz. Sounds gross- and it is- but still funny none the less. It also works well if my son has people sleeping over.
@WTFsunshine if you run a dehumidifier down there while they’re sleeping it off, maybe you could recover the alcohol from their breath.
@WTFsunshine my friend made this into a meme, but these are real people that we really know at a party we were really at. about half of us don’t have any stopping power (like she and i) while the rest of us are comprised of people that don’t drink, people that are too old for this shit, and/or people that drank too much too early and passed out, resulting in this kind of scene with some frequency.
it rubs the lotion on its skin
@chickenherpe
Our house was built in 1900 so it’s a cellar and not a basement. It used to flood every time it would rain. I’ve been working to get the water away from the house (previous owners had downspouts directed right onto the foundation - sigh). Our dehumidifier down there turns on less and less.
I’m tempted to take a picture because my husband and son made an awesome basement room out of nothing, but it would kind of be a violation of his privacy. It’s kinda cool and minimalist
Ours is finished to the point where it has concrete flooring and we sealed the walls with Kilz. A small amount of water still comes in at the edges of the floor, so we have a dehumidifer already down there and everything is on shelves. Eventually we’d like to hopefully fix the water issue and completely finish it.
@Avalora Make sure the ground around the home is sloped away from the house & the roof is draining away (and downslope) from your house.
Hopefully, they sealed the basement wall outside especially the cold joint at the base of the wall, and put drain pipes & rock in…
i live in an apartment, and there is a basement that we have access to…but i’ve never been in it. i’ve seen a bit of it from outside but just no reason to go down there.
parents live in a raised ranch like everyone else i knew growing up and everyone had like a half finished basement. my dad has a den, i had a playroom, then there’s unfinished bits like the hallway, laundry/storage room, and a space that’s kind of like a pantry that was supposed to be a second bathroom but sadly never got made into one. all nice and cool in the summer, but very cold in the winter, and damp, with a couple corners that get sopping when it rains too much. it’s definitely not like the finished basements you see on hgtv.
@jerk_nugget Yeah but those hgtv basements might also be mold factories several years later as well… we just don’t see it.
@Kidsandliz well yeah, any place could be worse than it looks on the outside, i just meant that around here ‘finished basement’ means something very different than what you see on tv and what people might consider ‘finished’ in other places.
What I need now is a good humidifier although I understand it is better to buy when an item is out of season, like the dehumidifier you offer today. So I guess I wait til next April or so to watch for one, right?
I live in Texas, we don’t get to have basements here for some reason.
@infornography I live in west Texas. Basements here are very rare because under the thin veneer of topsoil there’s nothing but granite and clay. However I live on the side of the mountain, and split-level houses are very common n my neighborhood. So my house is one story from the front and two-story from the back. The downstairs room is developed fully and it’s a game, laundry and art room. At the back of it there’s a sloped dirt basement. The dirt basement is completely undeveloped, it has some wooden shelves in there but I don’t store anything on them. Too creepy spidery for me. It just provides access to the heater that’s in the floor of the living room.
@moondrake
Your house sounds pretty cool.
In DFW, normally no basements. Nicer houses built in the 1st half of last century often have them tho. And a few $$$$ custom houses have them.
@f00l It has a lot of character. It was built in 1912, and I’m the third owner.
@infornography North DFW here, no basements because the ground moves way too much…lots of Foundation repair companies. When we were shopping our realtor suggested that if we wanted a pool to buy a house next to one that had a pool…good chance at some point it would shift into our yard anyway.
@tightwad In Florida most houses are built on a slab because your basement would be a swimming pool, the water table is usually about 6ft down. When the phone company lays underground cable the have to pressurize the casing with nitrogen, there are all these nitrogen bottles chained to phone poles down there.
Nope. Built on a slab because, um, apparently the builders were too lazy to dig. Kind of messes with the temperature as it’s always way cooler downstairs. Great in the summer but it’s cold down there in the winter unless I crank the heat.
We have a very nice & fully finished daylight basement. It has 2 bedrooms (one converted to electronics workshop), full restroom, laundry, exercise area & huge “rec room” with my stereo turntable area with multiple recliners, gas fireplace & beer refrigerator .
We built the house in the 80’s.
I live in the basement of a college dorm.
@JoetatoChip Do they know you’re there or is this an “unofficial” living situation?
Back when I was in college, there was a kid who, as the story goes, failed out of school and didn’t want to tell his parents. He reportedly lived in the library and ate crackers, ketchup packets, and whatever else was out for free at the student center for at least a quarter. He was a strange one.
I answered ‘I live in a house but don’t have one’ but every other answer has been the case for me at some point in the last 10 years.
Unfinished daylight basement but pre-plumbed when it’s ready to be finished. Or should I say when I’m ready to finish it.
Right now a few shelves for storage. Photo studio and a few pieces of workout equipment.
I have a hole in the ground that usta be a coal pit but the stairs rotted away at some point and they turned the cellar access into a hall closet and you access the cellar through a crawl space full of pit vipers and other creepy things.
Friends don’t ask friends about their sex dungeo . . . I mean BASEMENT (cough) situation.
And I have no corpses down there either.
@Pavlov Shh - what happens in the basement stays in the basement. You know the rules.
@Pavlov Until you brought it up I never thought to ask the sex of your dunge basement.
Basement’s in California desert? Shirley you jest.
We live in a floodway next to a small river at the bottom of a hill. We have a basement. We lost everything we had down there over the summer when we had seven feet of water down there for a week. We had a lot of stuff down there. Only one floor tile came up, so it’s more or less still finished.