Hugo Nebula wrote:
Plowman (News)" randomly hit the keyboard

Well, converting existing cellars round here is the in thing.

Around here, it's also the thing. But 'around here' is the ****ty
parts of a large Northern city, now inhabited by students. The
business model of the owners of the student houses (after removing all
the supporting structure from the roof void to squeeze a couple of
bedrooms up there) is to cram an extra couple of bedrooms into the
sub-floor void by digging down below the foundations, lay a concrete
slab on a notional amount of insulation on a damp-proof membrane, and
slap a thin coat of a waterproof render on the walls.

I lived in one of those in Leamington. My cellar room was actually not
bad, since I'm not very tall (the other guys in the house had to stoop
when they came in). It was a huge room, being basically the entire floor
area of the house, though I did have the gas meter overhanging one end
of the sofa that was in there. This was also the room I mentioned a
while ago where the NTL installer put the cable in through the extractor
fan.

The bad room in that house was the loft; it had been "converted" with a
bit of plasterboard and a Velux window, but an actual staircase was
apparently too much effort so the hatch and aluminium ladder remained.
The ladder blocked the door into one of the other rooms, so had to be
moved when not in use. There was no real furniture up there (couldn't
get it through the hatch, I guess) so the girl who lived there kept most
of her clothes in the big old wardrobe on the landing and just took up
the next day's stuff when she went to bed. She didn't have the whole
wardrobe to herself though - despite being a freestanding item of
furniture, half of it had been used to contain the hot water tank.

How she never fell off the ladder and down the stairwell after returning
from the pub, I do not know.

Still, it was cheap (my palatial room was £33 a week in 2003 IIRC) and
we had a lot of fun living there.

Pete