With all the horror stories I heard about issues with leaking pipes or faulty electrical circuits requiring ceilings and walls to be torn down, the real question is why we don’t do all the ceilings and walls like that.
My goofy old house with built with the basement floor on trusses and a roughly chest high crawl space underneath. The main benefit is that you can run duct work under the floor and have full height ceilings. The drawbacks is that you have a wood floor in a basement with clay soil.
Interesting, the basement ceiling must be pretty far outside the ground otherwise that requires a pretty deep hole! Around here is usually 6’ deep compared to ground level with ~2’ above ground and a slab with only the main drain under the slab…
Drywall is so cheap and easy, and leaks and failures so infrequent it doesn’t make sense to have “easy access” to the interior of walls. Drywall is the easy access.
With all the horror stories I heard about issues with leaking pipes or faulty electrical circuits requiring ceilings and walls to be torn down, the real question is why we don’t do all the ceilings and walls like that.
This is rhe same reason I will never buy a house on slab: gotta hammer up the floor, fix, repour and refloor if you ever need those pipes down below.
So you want a basement on dirt? So you can’t use the space for anything?
A lot of contemporary homes are built on hollow foundations with an accessible crawlspace for utilities.
Oh, crawl spaces are pretty rare further north because you need to be under the freezing level of the ground anyway so people have basements.
My goofy old house with built with the basement floor on trusses and a roughly chest high crawl space underneath. The main benefit is that you can run duct work under the floor and have full height ceilings. The drawbacks is that you have a wood floor in a basement with clay soil.
Interesting, the basement ceiling must be pretty far outside the ground otherwise that requires a pretty deep hole! Around here is usually 6’ deep compared to ground level with ~2’ above ground and a slab with only the main drain under the slab…
I’m up north too, but my house is so old it has a cellar foundation instead of a basement one.
Drywall is so cheap and easy, and leaks and failures so infrequent it doesn’t make sense to have “easy access” to the interior of walls. Drywall is the easy access.
Certainly easier than plaster and lathe. Patching that shit is terrible.