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