Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Why no basements?

Current heat wave got me thinking again about this question: Why are there not more homes with basements in the hot country? We live in Wyoming where is has been in upper 90's for the last several days, but we are nice and cool with our swamp cooler running in the afternoons. If we really had to, we could retreat to our fully finished basement where a jacket is required even on the hottest days.

I can understand not having a basement due to water table woes, but we hardly ever see new homes with basements even in dry areas. What's up with this do you think?

Expense, maybe?

Outside of tornado risks the primary reason is that we don't need to dig down very far to get the foundation below the frost line. Deep frost lines make sense to dig a little more and utilize that space in many cases for a basement.

^^^^ that's the only thing I can think of, cheaper to build without basement.

We don't have a swamp cooler or air conditioning. If it's too hot upstairs, go to the finished basement.

That's actually a pretty good question. Lots of basements in this area walk outs & in ground.. being involved in home building forever one of the very most efficient and affordable homes to build and maintain at least in this area is a berm house , which for those that don't know was basically a walkout basement with a roof.

WAG: Real estate taxes. They'd include it as living space. So your 2000sf house is now 4000 sf.

A breezeway between a house and garage is taxed as living space in some areas.

I'd go with expense also. Alot cheaper for a slab and maybe a crawl space

Cost prohibitive would be my guess. I’ve often wondered the same thing about tornado country. A concrete slab over basement.

Man...my basement is super cool.......quiet

afternoon nap hide out

92* outside now

I wouldn't trade my basement.
As long as they are "unfinished" here they
aren't taxed as additional sq. footage

You can have one here, but you got to have subsoil drains inside and out in pea gravel to a well with a pump. You best have emergency generator too. Outside walls have to be sealed. It’s expensive to do it correctly. You only see basements in commercial building down here.

The Houston Medical center basements flooded in 1976 from a freak 12” rain on June 17. I was working down there, lucky my truck was parked on 2nd floor of parking garage. We made a bunch of double time fixing pumps that were damaged. Electricians made even more.

Just wish I could use mine

We do it every day and that ain't expensive. It's when we have to bring in the Rock breakers that it gets expensive...

In Minnesota just about every house has a basement.

laffin’
You built it to small!

I wish I had one!

That.

The frost line here is 42”. If you have to dig down 42” for footings at that point it makes sense to just put a basement in.

The older suburban homes built in far west Texas often had basements, and I'm talking 1920s construction and maybe up into the 40s. Anything built after WWII probably will be on a slab.

We always had swamp coolers in El Paso. I sure wish they'd work in this part of the country.

Same here.

As long as it doesn’t have egress windows and is not a walkout basement it doesn’t count as living space.

But is it more expensive per square foot? Seems like if you had a ranch with the same square footage as a two story, including the basement, that had the same total floor space, the ranch would be more expensive.