These basement descriptions dovetail nicely with that BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? thread. The house I remember best from my childhood is the one we moved to when I was about middle school aged, and I moved out of there after community college and heading to university. In thinking about it just yesterday I realized that were I to have to move back into that house, I'd feel trapped. It was distinctive in its looks, with a very thick steamed shingle roof meant to look like an English thatched cottage. The exterior was stucco. The walls were thick plaster and it had pretty wood floors, except in the back ground floor that was concrete topped with wall-to-wall carpet. It was the mustiest house I've ever lived in, built on a hillside weeping with small springs. French drains barely touched the problem. And my mother smoked like a chimney. Add all of that and you have an olfactory quagmire that made your clothes and hair smell bad if you visited. I moved out as soon as I could and never spent the night there if I could help it. I hope the new owner has resolved the musty smell.

The basement in that house was under about 3/4 of the house, with a crawlspace into the remaining section. There was wall of cabinets set up down there that had originally been in the kitchen, but for some reason relocated and a new set built upstairs. I think it's because the woman who built the house was tiny and the counters in the kitchen were all pretty low for our very tall family. The rest of the space was a sloping area with a couple of windows allowing in some light, and one corner we tried to turn into a sort of rec area, but it was never very comfortable. There were windows over a soapstone sink (the laundry had been down there until relocated into the mudroom next to the kitchen). The window over the sink looked into the two-car garage that had really interesting wooden doors that had to be pushed from one side to the other. We were disappointed when it was replaced with a regular old aluminum door that rolled up. There was a sundeck on top of the garage, but we didn't use it often. There was one time, probably in my mid-20s, when I spent the night at the house and Mom left for work and locked the door. She had replaced all of the locks (even the basement door into the garage) with double keyed locks and I couldn't get out of the house. I was on the verge of climbing out of a back window or jumping down from the back of the sundeck when my brother returned home and I could leave. And that was the last time I stayed there.