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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":137512,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"schneps_byline":"","schneps_post_style":"","schneps_post_source":"","schneps_syndicated_read_more":"","schneps_post_source_sitename":"","schneps_syndicated_thumb_html":"","schneps_syndicated_thumb_src":"","schneps_post_source_shortname":"","schneps_post_source_url":"","schneps_post_source_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"districts":[],"class_list":["post-55433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-floors"],"acf":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/brownstoner.com\/forum-archive\/2011\/04\/dirt-square-in\/","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Dirt Square in Basement","url":"http:\/\/www.brownstoner.com\/forum-archive\/2011\/04\/dirt-square-in\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.brownstoner.com\/forum-archive\/2011\/04\/dirt-square-in\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":""},"articleSection":"Floors","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"greenpoint_southerners"}],"creator":["greenpoint_southerners"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Forum Archive","logo":""},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2011-04-22T09:45:50Z","datePublished":"2011-04-22T09:45:50Z","dateModified":"2011-04-22T09:53:44Z"},"rendered":"