What's in your basement?

[Basil]

 

[Vince]

About 20m of sand. In Holland everything has to be either nailed to the floor with enormous pilings or sit on a concrete raft.

[Jacomus]

Us! (Basement flat)

[PaulF]

Ley lines. Either that or a spacetime rift

[Cudzoziemiec]

Last time I had a basement, it mostly contained jam and pickles, but not Eric Pickles. Also bits of other people's discarded furniture.

[T42]

A few bottles of plonk, my summer car tyres, a tripod & griddle barbecue, a few remnants of winter wood, the washing machine & dryer, old cupboards full of old crockery & cutlery, a few leftover roofing tiles, and the current avatar of Mount Boxmore.

[Jaded]

Oh, there's an old boiler down there too. I always thought it was because it was too heavy to get out and they couldn't be arsed. However my boiler quote person tells me it is probably because it has asbestos in it. As does the current one too...

[Cudzoziemiec]

A few bottles of plonk, my summer car tyres, a tripod & griddle barbecue, a few remnants of winter wood, the washing machine & dryer, old cupboards full of old crockery & cutlery, a few leftover roofing tiles, and the current avatar of Mount Boxmore.

Shouldn't your summer tyres be on your car? It is July!

[pcolbeck]

Dont have one but since the engineering survey that came with the bungalow said that bed rock is only about a yard below the house I probably could excavate one if I so desired. Anyone want to buy a hundred cubic metres of limestone, buyer collects ?

[Ham]

How close are you to Bedrock?

[Ian H]

Wine, beer, cheese; random household tools, paint, etc.; an old tandem; some worryingly eccentric Victorian building work.

[ian]

I don't have a basement, which is sad. I'm more disappointed because my house is perched on a steep hill, so there is a supporting level under the ground floor where the hill falls away to the driveway (which goes under the house, so I suppose is a drive-thru basement of sorts). There must be something inside that void. It's like the mystery of the pyramids. I'm forbidden to dig a hole through the floor to find out despite the fact that it could be filled with dead bodies and immeasurably valuable treasure.

[Bledlow]

Earth. And probably some foundations.

[madcow]

Oh, there's an old boiler down there too.

You need a granny flat not a basement

When we had a basement it was mostly full of water!!
The house in question was  self-built job and the family concerned had not installed any perimeter drains on the hillside plot.  So when it rained ,as it did in the winter of 2000 or therabouts , our cellar filled with water so rapidly that we called the fire brigade.
They were so busy in York and Selby that we were long way down the list of priorities, so I went to a garden centre and bought a pump for making a fountain (I think it was the only functioning pump available in Yorkshire at the time) .
After several hours of nocturnal pumping (ooh err, missus) the water level subsided to a level at which I informed the FB that they were no longer needed. They were more than happy to cross me off their to-do list.
I ended up hacking through 6 inches of concrete to create a sump and installed a pump controlled by a float switch, as ground water was a constant problem.
I have never trusted a basement that hasn't got a full bunding , drainage and ventilation  set up since then.

The previous owners informed us that their sons used the basement as an indoor air rifle shooting range.

[Ian H]

Ours has a drain, a gully, and other evidence that storm-water used to be channelled through.  The storm-drain appears to have been diverted, so no running water now.  But it is below the dampcourse and we have no immediate plans to tank it.

[snail]

I bought a repossessed house. In the basement were:

A mixing desk, a dozen speakers and amps, a full drum kit (mostly bashed in), and a safe. My dad took an angle grinder to the safe.

The safe contained a gun.

[Bledlow]

With ammunition?

[Andrij]

Absolutely nothing, officer.