Wednesday, December 26, 2007

How I'm spending Christmas vacation

...Or, Look what a mess I've made.


I recently hinted that I'm going to build a wine cellar in my basement, and this is the week to get started! My house was built in 1956, so it's got a small room where the well used to be (of course, it has since been converted to municipal water supply). This little cinder block room is surrounded on 3 sides by dirt, so it's naturally temperature regulated at about 59°. To make it into a wine cellar I need to do a bit of rewiring, then fill some holes with foam gap filler, paint a moisture sealant on the concrete block walls, panel the walls, cover the floor, then put in the wine racks and stock it! And something about a door, too, probably...

Right now the well room looks like this:




But soon it will look like this:





2 comments:

Alison said...

With soil behind three of the walls your wine cellar should maintain a fairly constant temperature. Your door will be very important in keeping the temperature steady. It will need to be an exterior grade door although you can have glass in the door as long as it is double laminated. Add some weather-stripping around the door to ensure a good seal.

Can you use some type of stick-on paneling? Otherwise, if you have to frame the walls first, you'll lose a lot of interior space.

Our cellar is almost complete - just installing the wine racks now. You can see the photos at photos of our wine cellar here.

Good luck with your cellar.

Seamus said...

Yes, glueing up some paneling after sealing the walls.

Yours looks great, and an awesome door!