Dirt Square in Basement
The house we are buying has a strange area in the middle of an otherwise finished concrete floor in the unfinished basement. The rest of the basement is nice and smooth albeit 90 year old concrete, with a drain, etc, but there is this strange 6′ x 10′ or so area right in the middle…
The house we are buying has a strange area in the middle of an otherwise finished concrete floor in the unfinished basement. The rest of the basement is nice and smooth albeit 90 year old concrete, with a drain, etc, but there is this strange 6′ x 10′ or so area right in the middle over to one side that is dirt. You can tell they used some old board frames when they poured the basement to exclude that area and it isn’t even perfectly square. The dirt area appears to have been surrounded by some old wood stud walls with 1 x 3’s with 3-4″ gaps in between nailed up to the ceiling – almost like an animal pen – however only one wall still remains – the owner’s son removed the other walls 20 years ago when he was making a work area. She says she never knew what the area was for originally. The house was built in 1920. I’d like to eventually dig down the dirt and pour in some concrete to finish out the basement as a rec room, and the dirt area isn’t part of any of the foundation or support beam areas – just an open square area of dirt in the room so digging it out a few inches and filling it in wouldn’t be dangerous to the house as it is more or less in the left center of the room. Does anyone know what this area might have been used for and has anyone else run across this before? This room isn’t a cellar, its about 50% below grade with front and rear doors under the stoops with 4 windows and about a 9′ ceiling, so it’s a basement and not a cellar and there is no sub cellar underneath, it’s just never been used for anything but mechanicals and laundry.
We just had a steel beam installed in our cellar to replace a wooden one and two squares were cut out of the floor to create the foundation holes for the supporting poles. They will then be cemented around when we cement the entire cellar floor. Perhaps those squares used to be the foundation for some support poles? Has the support beam in your home ever been replaced?
A few thoughts. 1. My 1919 house has a laundry room in the cellar that had a wood floor suspended over dirt and a slate trough sink for laundry that drained into gravel underneath. I think these rooms were originally really wet so they just provided a lot of drainage to the ground. The wood floor was pretty rotten a hundred years later, though it had been covered in linoleum and might have survived better if it hadn’t. However, in my case there were obvious signs that this was a laundry room: sinks, stove for boiling water, and stairs up to the backyard where the clothesline was.
2. A dirt floor is better for storage of many foods that need humidity and cold, so cellars were often dirt floored for this reason. However, by 1920 central heating was common for new houses so they weren’t using cellars for cold storage anymore, or at least not in the same way, because cellars were no longer cold through the winter because of the gigantic coal furnaces common in the era.
3. my old cellar has a small triangle of open dirt where the waste pipes exit, but this is right by the front foundation wall, not in the middle.
With the right lighting, you could grow some awesome weed!
i have two of these, and i cemented over both, only to realize later on that they were the sewer traps for the house and for a drain in our back yard.
I would dig down a foot or so to make sure there isn’t a pipe with a trap before you cement over this hole. This could possibly be the access area where a plumber needs to get to if you have a clogged system, etc.
Let us know what happens!
indoor mushroom garden?
could there have been an oil tank there? and they just cemented around it?
Think John Wayne Gacy!!!!
My family bought an old house (1840s) with a marble foundation and unfinished, dirt cellar floor. But the washer and dryer was still down there…. with a plywood plank “road” from the stairs to the washer/dryer/slop sink. I hated going down there when I was a kid. It had this smell of decay and it had the old wiring and hanging lightbulbs that are in horror movies. Oh, and the rafters were only at about 5’10” so I bashed my head several times.
Previous owner probably buried there.