I’m in the upper Midwest and we have a weird crawl space underneath our living room. It’s a huge area and I can’t remember who was looking at our house (some repair or construction guy) and he said lots of people dig them out up here. We haven’t done it, but we could use that space and have considered it.

Thinking about doing this too. The new area would be a proper guest room/gym and additional storage.
Obviously seems silly since square footage doesn’t increase with the “dig out” but anyone have any thoughts on whether it’s good to do if you plan to stay in your house awhile.

This is common for Wardman rowhouses where the back part of the house is really a sleeping porch/deck that have been enclosed. Alot of things impact the cost. I know people who have dug theirs out for around $10K (made it into a nice storage area) and some that have paid over $100K for underpinning and digging down a couple feet. It depends on how your home is built, what you're impacting that's over it, how much you need to dig out, and your soil type. We plan on doing it on our house at some point. It is worth it in our neighborhood and there's no room to built up instead (historical district).

My split had a crawl space like that due to water table.

Anonymous wrote:A basement dig-out to add 80 sq feet of basement area will never be worth it.

Yup just spend the money to extend above ground.

A basement dig-out to add 80 sq feet of basement area will never be worth it.

OP here - we're working on a basement reno anyway -- we intend to stay here. Just trying to research more before we start interviewing contractors for feasibility. Btw, houses in my area are selling around $450-500/SF so if the costs are on the low end, it's would be a reasonable endeavor. (But not for $100K.)

There may be a reason it was excavated so much higher, like boulders that are only feasible to remove via blasting. This is unlikely to be a rational remodel choice in terms of ROI.

We have a weird crawl space that's under our family room, for some reason was not finished out with the rest of the basement. The "floor" of the crawl space is about 3' higher than the basement floor (currently accessed through a hatch, but we don't use it at all). It measures about 10x8 and would give us a significant amount of extra room in the basement.

Has anyone done this and could comment on complexity and cost? Obviously it would need to be excavated more than 3' to be able to put a foundation in but I have no idea if this is like a $30K project (structural work only) or a $100K project.