Is it essential to build a house with a basement (Denver: new home, crawl space)

[emkay]

My family and I have been looking at houses to buy for a long time. We recently found a great area that we want to be in and a house that we like - but it doesn't have a basement. Would it be a very bad move to buy a house without a basement in Colorado???

[denverian]

Maybe if you were out on the eastern plains because of the tornadoes. But in Denver, it's not really an issue to have shelter from tornadoes. Our basement has 9' ceilings and full windows (deep window wells) so we finished it and it doesn't seem like a basement at all. Plus we use the family room down there more in summer because it's so cool. If you have kids, it's a good place for them to play too.

[Katarina Witt]

We had a house w/o a basement in Louisville. The only issue was lack of storage space. It did have a crawl space, which helped.

[McGowdog]

Ever since I was a kid, I've always loved basements.

Although tornadoes are statistically rare in the metro area, they weren't rare the day that I saw three of them at once. That would be the one day you'd like a basement to go to.

We have a basement that's 90% finished (not under the stairs) with the high ceilings and deep window wells and they are nice as Denverian says...nice and cool in the summer-if not cold! But you better have good drainage.



We had so much rain last summer that the ground saturated and the water filled our wells from about 2 feet below grade and I was up for hours with a shop vac and a residential strength rug shampooer and about 150 trips to the toilet with buckets full of water. That and this rented carpet blower and we were dry again.

If the water table isn't right, it's a no-brainer; no basements.

If I didn't have a basement, a nice 1500 sq ft ranch would work.

[Mike from back east]

M-K: I can't imagine any family NOT wanting a basement.

On bad weather days the tykes can run, ride or riot on the bare concrete floor of unfinished basements without harming a thing.

If you're like 99% of families everywhere, you'll find a need for storage and seasonal items. Stuff happens. Then it multiplies.

Most basements here are very dry and without moisture problems of many eastern coastal areas.

Basements don't add much to the cost and are a great resale point. Our house in Fairfax County, VA didn't have one I hated it.

I'd avoid crawlspaces, most are nearly impossible to get in/out of and almost totally useless, IMO.

s/Mike

[Katarina Witt]

When we bought our first house, it was what we could afford. We now have a basement and love it.

[dj32]

if you plan on selling it in a few years, then no. I think no basements can be a problem for resale.

[formercalifornian]

All five of the houses I've owned were without basements, and I've never missed having one. Well-designed garage storage accommodates the necessary seasonal items. I admit that our house tends to collect detritus, especially since there are kids involved, but that's what Goodwill and trash cans are for!

[tfox]

I like basements, but I don't think that basements (even fully finished) really add all that much to the value of the home. There's two ways to look at this: one is that if you have a basement, you get a bunch of space for free. In a ranch, you get DOUBLE the space for virtually nothing extra. I like that. The other way of looking at it is that having a basement (finished or otherwise) is one of those money items that you never really get back on your home, so it's a poor way to spend your money if you're doing fix-up for resale.

We've even had a few posters post on city-data complaining about all the basements, trying to find homes with a slab, probably because they're moving from a part of the country where basements aren't common. As I recall, one poster liked the "solid" feeling of the floor with a slab (at least one the ground floor). I guess it's what you're used to. If you think about it, most of the out of staters these days are coming from non-basement places, so they probably don't care and/or are suspicious of basements because they don't understand our climate.

In this day and age, a slab is a lot cheaper to build in a new home than a basement, and since the market doesn't really put a high value on basements, it's no wonder why many newer homes do have only slabs. Older homes almost invariably have a basement.

So, that's to say I don't think it will affect you too much, maybe a little bit. As long as YOU don't care, I don't think you should worry overly about what might be there on the other end.

[vegaspilgrim]

In Denver, YES-- you definitely want a basement. During the summer, it could be really hot upstairs, but nice and cool down there. If you have kids they can go down there and make noise and it will still be relatively quiet upstairs. Denver is a good example of "Basement USA." In other places (the parts of the country tfox is talking about), here in Phoenix for example, NOBODY has basements; the ground here is so hard with caliche that it would be astronomically expensive just to build one. BTW, tfox, certain areas in Denver do have basement flooding problems; my family's house has never had that problem, but some of the neighbors a block away have. Also, question-- is a house with a basement more structurally stable than one without? Especially considering that much of the soil in the Denver area is pretty "loose"?