My House Temprature...

So upstairs keeps at a pretty solid 71-72. Might hit 73 on a hot day.

But the downstairs there is a storage room where I had planned to do all my brewing. I set a thermometer down there for a couple of days the the temps overnight fall to a brisk 59.7 or so, and during the day will go as high as 61.

From what I can gather that is too cold for ale, but not cold enough for lager? Is there something good that I can ferment at those temps?

60ish should actually be just fine for ale; I wish I had something that maintained that kind of temp.

I would kill for a room like that.

I'd fill up a carboy with water and see what temperaures you get. You 'll get a 3-10 degree bump upwards during primary fermentation as fermentation is an exothermic process. You can always move it to the warmer room as an out.

I would guess that it would be fairly easy to bump the temp up a few degrees with a space heater, if you had to.

My garage in the winter gets down to a chilly 50 to 55. (Hey, it's southern California.) I use a big Rubbermaid 18 gallon tub partially full of water to set my carboy in during fermentation. I used a heating pad with adjustable settings. With a little trial and error, I was able to position the heating pad partially under the corner of the tub and get the temp to stay in the mid 60's.

my house is EXACTLY the same. 72 upstairs, the basement is about 60. I am hoping to make some KILLER ales, still too warm for Lager though.

Remember, wort temp is usually about 4 degrees warmer then room temp.

The wort temp is definitely a few degrees higher than the ambient temps of the room... I thought I was safe with a room temp of around 70, since I was supposed to ferment between 68-72... my fermenters were still staying around 75 at the lowest...

You're right, that's not cold enough for lager fermentation. For that, you'll need nothing less than a lagering chamber of some kind. There are different ways of going about this. One way is to build an insulated box or small room with its own dedicated A/C unit. Another method (the route I chose, given its ease) is to get your hands on a chest freezer that is able to fit carboys inside. Then get yourself an inline temperature controller from Johnson Controls. See here. You simply plug the controller into the receptacle, plug the freezer into the controller, set the temp probe inside the freezer, set the freezer to the coldest setting, and then set the controller to whatever temp you're looking for. What it then does is interrupt the power feed to the freezer to maintain that set temp. It's awesome for lagers and cold-conditioning ales.

As for regular ale fermentation: 59f is at the low end of the range for most ale yeasts. If you wanna bump it up to 65, that's as easy as slapping a heating pad against the carboy.