Hello all, The basement of my house is currently half dug out and finished. My wife and I want to dig out the other half of the basement and finish it to roughly double the basement area. I have heard that this may sometimes not be possible depending on how the fondation of the house was poured. I am posting here to try to get some feedback on this from anybody who may have any experience or suggestions for this. I have taken pictures of inside the crawl space (the first one shows the door that leads into the crawl space) here: [url]http://www.villagephotos.com/pubbrowse.asp?folder_id=1445928[/url] The size of the finished sections is roughly 28ft x 17ft while to size of the unfinished section is a little larger than this. Any help is greatly appericated. Thanks.

Now that fall is approaching, i want to work on making my home more energy efficient. it is a ranch built in the mid 1950s...so i'm not expecting any miracles. tops on my project is insulating the ducts from my forced air gas furnance. all the ducts go through the basement, which is not heated, and in the winter the temp can get to a little below 50 degrees down there. two rooms are above a small crawlspace. so i thought i would add insulation above. does anyone think this will improve the warmth of the rooms above? there rooms have hardwood floors. i was reading articles on the internet and some lead me to believe i will see a difference, and others make it seem it is a waste of money to insulate the crawlspace. any thoughts?