Yvonne PerkinsNew owners of a home in Melbourne discover an extensive model train set-up under the floor when they move in.
Bruce Elrick@perkinsy
Wait, do houses in Australia not normally have a basement?
"Under the floor"?
@virtuous_sloth It is incredibly rare for houses in Australia to have basements. Department stores have basements, not houses. Generally older houses have the pillars of wood or bricks stuck into the ground under the house to form the foundations. These are called 'stumps' and many houses need the stumps to be replaced when someone buys the house because they are old. This is expensive.
The stumps are set in the dirt of the ground in which the house is built. You may find building rubble from when the house was first built under the house but definitely nothing valuable.
My father built a dark room to develop photographs under the floor of a house we lived in. The house was on the hill so you could stand up under the house. The floor was dirt. Australia has lots of spiders and furry, large ones called huntsmen. They like dark areas such as under houses, so I was a bit worried about spiders when I was developing photos.
@perkinsy
In Canada there are older houses without a basement, just what we'd call a crawlspace, but since you typically need to dig the foundation below the frost line (max depth for freezing to occur, depends on location in country, typically 3-6 feet) it's not much more expensive to make it a basement.
Under the floor sounds odd since it implies, to my ears, that it was in a crawlspace, not another level of the house, which it isn't based on the photos.
@virtuous_sloth It is a house that is probably built on a hill. So there is more space under the floor on one side of the house than the other. If the house is built on flat ground then the space under the floor is incredibly tight.