As I wrote in my last article, frost and frozen ground has been a problem here in the North forever. With that in mind most, but not all, homes have a basement. Every conventional building must have a foundation and it needs to be at least 3.5-feet deep. In building a new house, the builder would have to go at least that deep and by then was half way to a 7-foot deep basement — a common depth. True, some basements were 8 or 9 feet deep. Even a house with a crawl space would have footings that went down 3 to 4 feet, and then the house was built up to leave an area that all the tradesmen could crawl around in to install pipes, wires, pumps, etc. Having made this excavation into the ground, some smart people figured out that by extending the basement out away from the house they had in effect a well pit. These spaces, called a basement offset, had some advantages over a true well pit and a lot of disadvantages too.
Like a good well pit, if such a thing ever existed, the basement offset would be large enough to house a pump and pressure tank. It would be deep enough that the pump service man could stand up and it would have a concrete floor that sloped to the true basement and, if a floor drain was nearby, that was an added benefit. A basement offset deeper than the rest of the basement — and these did occur — was often a mess as water would collect in it.