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Thumb of Michigan | I live in an old farmhouse. The center of the house has a full basement. The rest is crawl space. Most of the crawlspace was due to adding onto the original structure. Wasn't up to me, I was too young, but I sure wish someone would have went ahead and dug a basement under each addition rather than a crawl space.
Have a cabin that sits on a kind of unique crawl space. It was buily=t sometime in the 90's. Has a little entry door- maybe 2' high by 3 ' wide- to access it. It is high and dry. It was wired with lights and plugs, and its pretty tall. Once I wiggle in there, I can stand up between the floor joists. I sure wish they'd have went even 1 block higher and provided access so the space could be utilized, but the didn't. It would have taken a lot more fill on the outside to make it work I think, the water tables high there and I'm sure they were trying to keep above it.
Have a friend who built in a wet area, he dug a pond to have a pond, and also to get fill for the house. Poured a floor inside the foundation, and went up maybe 3 or 4 feet to the floor joists off the floor. Its got lights and the floor to scoot around on, he gets around on a creeper under there. He has some kind of short furnace and water heater under there. I razzed him about not building a full basement, but he didn't have the dough to move a lot more dirt to raise the house to allow for it. He gets by with it, and I guess if I had to have a crawl space, one like his is easier to get around in than any other I've seen. He accesses it from the outside via a large door setup (not sure what the right word for them is). Its a one piece metal access deal with double doors at an angle to the ground.
So, when its all said and done, I have some of everything. And, if I were building and for whatever reason a full basement wasn't in the cards, a crawl space wouldn't be either. I hate them. I'd poor a slab and build on it before I'd screw around with a crawl space. I'd heat the slab, and theres enough flooring materials with some sort of padded underlayment that you probably wouldn't notice that you were walking on a slab.
I worked construction in Houston one summer, putting water and sewer pipe in a subdivision. Every house was going on a slab, according to the locals I worked with that was pretty common. I was doing some of the house water hook ups, none of those went into the slab. There weren't any walls up when I came home, so no idea how they got water in and the sewage out.
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building a home question
