Several years ago, I finished the basement to make it a USble room.
Both of us walled off the furnace so it had its own room, & the rest of the basement was used as a play & entertainment area. There was a bar down there, a pool table, & the one corner had a giant screen cable set with a gaming system. It was giant enough to have thirty people or twenty youngsters with their sleeping bags. As a kid, basements spooked me, although I enjoyed this area. It had its own entrance & there were patio doors leading to the pool. Nothing about this basement scared me. My child was down there the other night & he came upstairs yelling that his sibling was lost in the basement. They were playing a game & he thought his sibling was just going to the powder room. I thought of the furnace & how I used to guess they were monsters. I shook it off knowing that the furnace wasn’t going to morph into a monster & eat our son. I went downstairs with our child the people I was with and I started to look around. I went over to the furnace room, & I started to open the door. I don’t assume why I hesitated, although I wasn’t ready to look at the furnace. I heard a giggle & I shivered, & then a frisson of anger went up our spine. How dare our youngest child do this to his sibling? I pulled the door open & he jumped out while yelling, ‘BOO!’. I wasn’t cheerful, but our youngest child was extremely cheerful, while our oldest was furious because he was afraid to go into the furnace room.