They are quite useful for packrats who have trouble throwing stuff away:
1)Move into house with basement
2)“look at all this space down here, I can store all these old boxes of stuff I don’t want to throw away”
3)the inevitable flood happens
4)junk gets thrown out
Seems easier than this:
Basements are most common in cold weather areas where the foundations must be sunk four feet or more below the surface in order to prevent frost heaves. Once you’ve sunk your foundations that deep, digging a few feet more to make it a basement is pretty much a no-brainer. I’ve never lived in a house with a basement myself, but that’s because I refuse to live anywhere that has below-0F winter temperatures or a frost line that goes more than six inches deep in winter.
Northwest Louisiana is part of the East Texas hill country geologically. My ancestors on that side of the family started out in northern Alabama during the American Civil War, got burned out as giant armies trod back and forth over their farm, and decided to move west to Texas. Their wagon broke down in Northwest Louisiana on the way to Texas, they looked around, and said “We’re home.” And stayed there for the next 140 years. My great-great grandfather was a teenager at the end of the Civil War, and died in 1947 after WW2. What a life. That was some history he saw…
They are pervasive here where I live, and we usually only have at most a couple -0F days a year.
Guess what, though? About once a decade, a huge number of basements get wrecked because of the the infrequent freak rainstorms. It’s hard to gauge based on topo maps who is vulnerable as well. Growing up, we had what was termed a “1000 year storm”, which we avoided serious damage by just having a crawlspace. Our cars may literally have floated off; there was dead fish on our lawn when we came back from vacation, and the nearest lake is close to a mile away… Our neighbors’ damages were in the thousands, and ours were about $2 for a new water heater part because my dad couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to clean it out.
My condo building has a basement, but I made sure to buy quite uphill from the lovely local river. I like the idea of basements. But I’ve seen so many wrecked. And they can be very tough to get back to 100% after a flood.
It’s gotten down to 0F here in Santa Clara exactly, uhm… nope. In fact, we usually only have two or three days a year where it even goes below freezing. I have a crawlspace, and a house built in 1961, and not a single pipe has ever frozen under the house in that entire time.
How nice for you in Santa Clara. A lovely place, and absent the shit weather of my area of the country that has features of northern Norway and southern India.
ETA: And it is nice. Don’t get me wrong, most of Cali is awesome, weather-wise, nature-wise, whatever-wise compared to where I live.
Did this with a friend’s place in Maine in the 1980s. He dug a basement, built a cinderblock foundation to fit his two-story cabin. Then one weekend he bought many cases of beer and invited about 25 people. We jacked up the home, put it on rollers and used a come-along to slide it about 40 feet to its new location. Worked fine and no one was hurt.
Hold my beer and watch this?
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