Is it worth building a basement?
Is it worth building a basement? Building a basement advantages and disadvantages? Looking through the designs of single-family houses, you can see a trend of abandoning the construction of basements. Out of several thousand designs in one of the online catalogs of house designs, only a few hundred of them are basement house designs. In this post we will consider whether it is really worth giving up the basement of the house. It certainly has some advantages, but what are the disadvantages? To begin with, I propose to analyze the possible disadvantages of building a house without a basement.First of all, Poles tend to accumulate so-called ” appendages ” (that is, things we say “will come in handy”).
I am a perfect example of this attitude. I don’t like to throw away things that I may someday find useful. Even if I can’t imagine a possible use for them in the next 10 years. No matter how I have something, I feel bad about throwing it away. So, for me, the basement would be primarily a storage area for useful things. There would probably be room for a boiler room, for preserves, for food supplies (it’s sometimes easier to buy 50 kg of potatoes and keep them in the basement than to go to the store every week) and so on. But the primary function of the basement would be to keep various things in it. For this reason, a house without a basement would certainly be totally cluttered throughout the rest of its space. This is the basic disadvantage of not having a basement: lack of space for storing various things.
If the house is to be heated with a solid-fuel boiler, there must be room in the house for a boiler room. A solid fuel boiler, especially with a storage tank for that fuel, is not a small appliance the size of a kitchen cabinet! It must have enough space for itself in the boiler room. If you fuel your home with heating oil, in addition, you need to allocate space in the house for the fuel tank. Thus, the construction of a boiler room requires a lot of space. It is a pity to waste such space between the four walls of the house. So it is more convenient then to build a boiler room in the basement. If there is no basement, a problem arises.
The analogous situation is with the garage. One still encounters designs in which the garage is located below the surface of the ground. If you do not build the garage under the residential level, you must have it on the ground or somewhere away from the house in general.
The basement can be used for our hobbies
The basement is also a great place for rooms that you can’t really imagine elsewhere. For example, the basement is a great place for a gym, laundry room, for example, or a room to indulge in fancy hobbies like gluing together plastic models or building H0 scale model railroads.
A basement gives you the opportunity to use an additional floor. If the height of the house is limited by local building conditions, it can be extended lengthwise, widthwise or in depth. If, on the other hand, the plot of land is not large enough to expand the area of the house sideways at will, the only thing left is to use the basement. If there is no place to put a garage in the body of the house, you need to dig it underground. The analogy is, for example, with the boiler room and other utility rooms. Lack of a basement means lack of this possibility.
In some cases, the basement is an additional hassle for the distribution of central heating. In the case of a boiler located on the first floor, the distribution of heat around the basement will require the installation of a circulating pump for the central heating system. Otherwise, hot water will not circulate in the lower section of the system, so, for example, it will not power the radiator in the laundry and drying room and gym. After all, it is not always possible to place the boiler on the lowest floor. The heat source for the central heating system can be, for example, a fireplace with a water mantle, which, for decorative reasons, is rather placed on the first floor, in the living room.
So now the advantages
First and foremost, a house without a basement (with X area) is cheaper than a house with a basement (with X area above ground). It avoids buying concrete, making deeper excavations, insulating foundation walls and so on.
Second, a house without a basement is easier and faster to build.
Third, it is easier to build a house with shallow foundations in an area with high groundwater levels than a house with a basement. In the latter case, building a house can mean years of fighting with water flooding the basement.
There are other advantages as well, but these are rather details. The rooms in the basement are usually lower than those in the above-ground floors. So for pouring the basement floor, a separate set of stamps is needed, shorter than those used later. Due to the necessity of the work (the floor above the basement first), it is not possible to buy one set of stamps and then shorten them.
That’s all I’ve come up with so far. I encourage you to leave comments!
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