Home underground cellar idea

Freud had something to say about people like you... ;-)

The soil here in the Willamette Valley, OR is almost identical red clay (or so I hear, I've never seen yours, but ours is red, solid, and deep). Anyway, the moisture penetration is poor, so you may not need to worry about humidy. The clay is so solid I've dug it out and thrown coffee cups on a wheel with it, using a bit of ball clay to add plasticity.

I keep my wine in a wooden cabinet attached to a wall of the foundation under our house in a half-basement. It keeps fine and varies maybe 20F in temp at most from winter to summer, from 40F to 60F.

--arne

Huh?

Pittsburgh is one big lump of clay and we have water infiltration issues galore, it has to go somewhere. Most of our foundations are 8 to 12 inch cement block with waterproofing on the outside and french drains on both the inside and outside in new construction. We usually fill the ouside perimeter with either gravel or crushed limestone to get the water away from the walls, we backfill to about 1 foot from the surface. I would never enter a hole over 6 feet deep without really well built walls, when they collapse it's a really bad day.

High humidity can cause mold to grow on the outside of a real cork but it just looks bad, it's not an issue if it's a good cork. That's why they used to use lead capsules, it would cover the cork and it did not corrode since the lead was coated too. Joe

This is why I wax my bottled wine necks. If the wax is at the right temperature when applied, it can be peeled off easily and recycled.

Opps. Forgot about that one, it looks good too.

Joe

I guess our clay must be different from yours. I know of multiple

100yo+ bare clay root cellars 6-8' deep that are yet to cave in. The oldest of these was forgotten in the 1910's when the new house was built over it and rediscovered in 1984 when my father fell through the floor above this 8' cubed pit. Had he not caught a solid beam with his arms, he'd have broken a leg or worse. I remember having to walk out across the floor to my dad with a rope, since I weighed 60lbs and his brother weighed 290lbs. When the floor was replaced, a trap door was reinstalled and a new insulated roof was put over the pit. My great uncle still uses that root cellar for potatoes and the like. Maybe cave-ins are just a matter of time in all these cases, but I find it doubtful.

Of course, drainage is mucho important to keeping all those cellars open (as is keeping the cellar small and built underneath a much larger structure with its own drains as well) but I didn't think r.c.w was the appropriate venue for the subject.

Thanks for the tips on avoiding moldy corks. I'd rather just keep my humidity in the ccrrect range, but if that becomes impossible, I will look to wax sealing.

Could you go into some detail regarding waxing instead of capsules? Type of wax, temperatures, etc.

I ask because I live in Thailand and wine making supplies are scarce here, as well as being expensive and perhaps waxing would save a bit.

Cheers,

Anon (Bangkok, Thailand)

Must be. It happens all the time up here, maybe we more get more water quicker. We shore up anything deeper than waist deep as a general rule in construction up here. This was in our paper on the 5th:

The wax works well. I looked in a couple references to see what the RH range should be but didn't see anything specific, the only one that talked about humidity said a musty smell is an issue as it may get through a cork to the wine.

Joe

My prayers are with these working men as they recover. That must be a dreadful situation in which to find one's self.

I am no geologist, but as I understand it, the exact structure of clay is extremely important to its porousness and other related characteristics. And I suppose I should also point out that I do not know that these cellars were not all lined with wooden shoring originally, but they have been in use, in most cases for at least two generations, without any shoring at all. But as I pointed out, each and every one is also less than 100sq ft and dug underneath a house 5-10 times that area.

And further, I appreciate you acceptng disagreement like a gentleman and not a buffoon. I hope you will understand that one never knows how anyone will respond to differences on USENET and so hesitation sets in before hitting the send button.

If I were perfect I would get paid a lot more at work. :o) The older you get the more your realize how little you can learn in the time we are here.

I was responsible for worker safety during a construction project, that's the only reason I knew anything about collapses. OSHA has a rule that requires shoring a ditch at anything over 5 feet as I recall. If the hole is very wide a collapse won't bury the occupant completely, so there is some judgement applied there too; we don't shore up a foundation hole as a rule. I just didn't want you to get hurt, sorry if it came off testy.

This seems to be an atypical usenet group, we are rather civilized compared to some.

Joe

I played with this idea a bit, it'd be nice to press signet into the wax, but all I did was melt some parrafin wax, add some crayons for colour, and dripped it onto the top of the bottle, it looked kind of nice.

You can order a high quality wax seal at Jason Townsend (a repro company catering to re-enactors) for about $12.50+shipping. It comes with 2 sticks of sealing wax, but parafin and crayola gives you a wider pallete.