Mysterious basements

Fellow blogger Jaz from October Farm has recently blogged a series of posts about her "ugly" basement and all the stuff that is in it. This made me think of the basements I experienced in my life: mainly the one of my grandmother's house, which I blogged about extensively here and the one of my parents' house, where was/is my bedroom.  The basement in many houses is basically a clutter room, but at home it was and is big enough to be a floor of its own (and i know in architecture technically the basement is not a "floor" but there you go). We had many rooms in it, including the living room where the TV was, the table where we played D&Dr, by a fairly large library, a computer room, a tool room, my own bedroom and at least two storage rooms: one with a freezer and a wine cellar, another one, the "cold room", divided into two sub-rooms, one for other food (during Christmastime especially) and drinks and one mainly for logs for the fireplaces.

The basement in my parents' place is much bigger than the basement in my grandmother's house was, but it was not as mysterious: there was no "secret passage" in it. Nevertheless, it had/has its fair share of mystery: the cold room which we did not have the right to spend time in as children because it had to stay cold all year long and we could not keep the door open had all the mystery of forbidden places, the fireplace was made of rough stones and looked primitive, as if it belonged to another age (in our make belief games it was often the entry of a dragon's cave, or a castle) and well, there were plenty of old stuff, old books and memorabilia to feed our imagination We spent many rainy days, cold days, heatwave days in the basement without being bored. So I have a fondness for basements and what we can discover in them.