A COOL CELLAR

By Steve Hughes

T H R E E T R E E C E L L A R S!

A Cool Cellar Steve Hughes, 2010

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a cellar.

could see that this thing was getting out of hand. We had just returned from Eastern Washington vineyards with a truckload of grapes to be turned into wine. Doing the math, I realized that in about 10 months I was going to have about 600 bottles of new

wine to store, not to mention the nearly 10 cases of wine we had collected from tastings in our travels, and the 300+ bottles left from the last few years of winemaking. I only had a little 52 bottle wine cooler and it was already full. Where am I going to put all this wine? I wondered. I NEED

I had a few options on where to put a new wine cellar. One was to expand into a tall crawl space next to the basement, another was to steal space from a very much used and needed storage room. A third space I identied was a nished open space at the end of a long hallway that was getting used more and more to put stuff that we were accumulating faster than we could get rid of. The crawl space expansion sounded like the most work, and after guring out how much room Id need for around 1,000 bottles, the storage closet was too small. Like Goldilocks checking the bears chairs, I determined the the room at the end of the hall was just right. I tackled the clutter and made a run to the dump and Goodwill. Then theres that old oak antique roll top desk in the corner. An ad on Craigslist yielded no results. My wife was sad that I was considering selling our rst antique purchase and asked, why dont you work it into the plans? You can do it. A roll top desk in a wine cellar? Id never heard of such a thing, but why not? So heres how I tackled building this new cellar: 1. The Plan Armed with a cup of coffee and a tape measure, I went down to the space and mapped out the would be wine cellar including the walls, windows, outlets, switches, light xtures, ceiling heights

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and other features on a sheet of graph paper. And I measured a bunch of different types of wine bottles so I could be sure the racks will hold the odd bottle that we may end up with. Then I laid this all out on the CAD program I use for my day job as a Construction Consultant, as a basis for a new wine cellar layout. A Computer Aided Design program is basically an expensive piece of graph paper, which would have worked equally well for designing the cellar. Planning the layout of the new wine racks needed to efciently use the square footage of the room including corners, the center of the room and little nooks and crannies. I liked the concept of vertical ladder style racking where each bottle gets it own little home, allowing me to select any bottle I want without moving bottles that may be on top of it. I also realized that Ill be making large batches of the same wine which could be more efciently stored in diamond racking. So the design would incorporate both style racks. In order to maximize the inside corners of the room, I designed individual ladder towers that turned the corner at 30 and 60 giving the corners a curved appearance. For the purposes of having clear space to move around in the cellar I allowed a minimum of 30. To do this in the design phase, I drew a 30 circle to scale on the oor plan and then just dragged it around the plan to be sure it can be moved without touching any racking or other obstacles. Because there was so much useable space in the center of the room, I was able to pull racks into the middle from two directions, effectively making the room into a zig zag shape of wine racks. This also allowed me to classify certain areas in the cellar as the Red Gallery, White Gallery, Sparkling Gallery, Reserves Gallery
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and the Nouveaux Niche, the latter being where my newly bottled wines will age for up to a year before being ready to drink. For the racking I pulled from the north wall into the center of the room, I designed a double-deep, stepped-down series of towers that create a wine-bottle-waterfall effect capped at the end with shelves cut from 1x4s. 2. Passive Cooling Having majored in Environmental Science in college and studied quite a bit about solar energy and earth sheltering, I decided to try to get Mother Earth to provide the cooling. The back wall of the cellar was a drywalled and insulated framed wall in front of a ten foot high foundation. The foundation and the earth behind it is, in effect, a heat sink that transfers the heat of the warmer air in the room into the cooler ground on the other side. Conversely, if the air in the cellar is cooler than our average ambient temperature of about 55F it will radiate its heat back and maintain a stabile temperature. I was loathe to remove the drywall in order to get the air contact with the foundation, so instead, I cut a 10 wide strip across the bottom of the wall and another eight feet above the oor. Then I simply pulled out the insulation through these strips and used a 12 x 12 bercement perforated soft panel to cover the openings. By doing this, I developed convection currents where the warmer air at the top of the room circulated down and across the foundation giving up the heat to the ground outside. The top vent was purposefully located a couple feet below the surface on the outside because the top couple feet of earth is subject to warming and cooling over the course of the year while the ground below the top two feet remains very stabile at 55F to 60F. 3. Framing, Insulating and Finishing the Walls and Ceiling

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The interior walls, including the new walls I built to close off the cellar, needed to be insulated to maximize the cooling efciency. I reused the insulation from the foundation wall for the new walls. Again, so as to minimize additional drywall work (did I mention I really dont like doing drywall?) I located the studs in the other interior walls with a stud nder and then drilled 2 holes near the top of each stud bay. I rented an insulation blower and lled the wall cavities with cellulose insulation. The ceiling was also lled in a similar manner, except the holes needed to be elongated so the blower hose could be pushed to within about 4 of the ends of the joist bays and drawn out as they lled in order to get them completely full. Once the insulation was nished, I was able to ll the holes in the walls and ceiling with some expansive insulation foam (it comes in a can like spray paint). As it dries and expands it creates a little mushroom shaped cap that protrudes out of the hole. Then with a serrated bread knife, I cut the hardened foam ush with the walls and ceiling. A couple coats of joint compound followed by a squirt of canned touch up texture to make the patches match the surrounding wall and were ready to paint. We selected a paint color called Raisin, which we thought appropriate, but unfortunately it took four coats to cover the lighter paint behind it. Next I mapped out the shape of the racking on the concrete oor. The concrete ooring under the racks would also act as heat absorbers, so rather than installing ooring there, I just painted the concrete a color matching the oor covering. 4. Milling the Rough Cedar Lumber

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In the interest of keeping costs down, I found a local lumber yard that was moving some green 8 rough sawn tight knot grade cedar 1x4s. Our cellar was not intended to be a place to sit and enjoy drinking wine but a tasteful wine storage room. And as a counterbalance to many of the formalities of our home and furnishings, I felt that a little more rustic approach to the racking was justied. A few knots and saw blade marks added character like a hand hewn beam rather than detracting from the elegance. Since the boards were rough sawn, however, I planed off the rough face with a rented planer. After planing, I ripped most of the 1x4s in half, making 1x2s out of them. Setting aside enough of the 1x2s for the upright legs, horizontal face supports and nailers on the backs, I then ripped the rest of the 1x2s in half again, making the 1x1 ladder pieces that will cradle the bottles. I stacked all this cut and still wet wood on stickers -- some of the 1x1s laid crossways between each layer of wood -- in the garage to dry. Drying took about 4 months during the summer months. I counted and cut the 1x2 uprights to length, essentially squaring up the ends but leaving them at about 95-3/4 long. I wanted to have the ladder racks 11 deep as thats slightly deeper than the typical wine bottle, but if I cut the 1x1s at 11, Id get 8 pieces per 8 stick. At 10-1/2 Id get one more piece from each stick. So I would just hold the ladder rungs back 1/4 from the front and back of the uprights when assembling the racks. About halfway through cutting the ladder rungs, I realized I was cutting over 2,400 of them. I lled up a garden cart and more than three of my 25 gallon plastic vineyard bins with them by the time I had them all cut. 5. Building the Jig With very repetitive tasks, I nearly always gure out a jig to make that will simplify, accelerate, and replicate the nished product. And building 94 ladders, some double sided, some single, qualies as a repetitive task. With building any jig, you need to consider how to reduce any excessive movements, materials and energy. If one nail can do the work of two, then so be it. So the jig plan
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was to build a framework where I could drop in the 1x1 rungs for one side of the rack, then lay the 1x2 uprights over the rungs followed by the 1x1 rungs on the other side while all being accurately laid out ready for nailing. Then with a nish nailing gun Id shoot 2 nails tying together the three pieces of wood. Forty shots of the nailer, and one ladder was assembled. The jig consisted of a half sheet of plywood (2x8) to which I screwed 2 thick by 7-3/4 by 3-3/8 blocks that became the voids of the frames. Along what would become the front of the ladder frame, I screwed a 2 thick strip 8 long. Along the bottom edge of the plywood, a block acted as a stop for the uprights. The space between the strip and the blocks was kept at 1-5/8 and the space between the blocks was 7/8. This allowed for a bit of play to be able to lift out the completed frames without them binding up in the jig. 6. Building the Ladder-style Racking Part of the plan was to have one row of display bottles in each tower. I played with the angle of several bottles so the corks would stay wet and found that 15 was just about right. So the block below the display bottle support was cut on that angle. The waterfall racking was built very similarly to the standard towers, except the 1x1s were cut at 1 10-1/2, three uprights were used to hold a double set of bottles and the display supports angled down in opposite directions. The width, then, was 1-11. The rst, tallest tower matched those of the others, and then they were

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reduced in height by 4-3/4 for each subsequent ladder. The last ladder was reached when the top was at the level just above the display bottle. To connect the ladders together, I laid them down on the oor, and using a 2x4 block for a spacer, installed the 1x2 facings across them at the fth bottle level, then again at the bottoms of the display supports, the next level above the display support, and above 5 more rows. The top 1x2 facing extended up above the tops of the vertical legs to keep enough room for a bottle in the top row. Then I ipped the whole rack over and installed 1x2 nailers at the 5th row, 10th row and 15th row. This keeps the ladders from spreading when loaded with bottles and gives a way to screw the racking to the wall studs. 7. Diamond Racking One of the racks that I pulled into the center of the room was going to be a 32 wide diamond rack. The rectangular frame was built with two 1x6 cedar boards for each side and three slightly spaced 1x4s for the tops and bottoms, with the bottom sitting 3-1/2 above the oor. The total rack stands 8 tall. The spaced 1x4s allows for a little more air exposure to the painted concrete below the oor of the rack. The diamonds were cut from 1x2s at 21-7/8 and nailed together pinwheel fashion, allowing me to cut all the pieces the same length. This way I cut 36 of
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these pieces to make 9 squares and three stacked bins. 11 1x1 sticks hold the squares together and it is through these 1x1s that I fastened the diamonds to the rectangular frame and to each other. 8. Flooring I chose cork ooring for the oor covering -- another reason to leave the oors under the racks exposed concrete since it has more insulative qualities than most other hard oor surfaces. Three coats of latex polyurethane sealed the ooring with a satin nish and gives it some resistance to moisture. The oor tiles abut the fronts of the racking and then I used a cedar 1x4 as a baseboard applied to the fronts of the racks to nish out the oor-to-racking transitions. The 1x4s ushed out with the lowest course of 1x1 ladder rungs. 9. Lighting and Temperature Monitoring Over the years Ive learned the effectiveness of using lighting to create ambiance as well as illuminating work areas, so I used a track light with small halogen oods to light up each section of the racking. The track and lights are black so they are virtually invisible against the raisin paint color. These lights essentially light up the racking but dont draw attention to themselves. With a dimmer switch set to about 1/3 level, the room is perfectly lit. The display row of bottles were highlighted using tiny, low voltage, under-cabinet lights that snap over a wire set into a metal channel. The metal channel was glued to the under side of the 1x1 rungs of the row above the display row. To hold these in place while the glue dried, I strapped them to the rungs with zip ties. One of these light bulbs accents two side by side bottles and is placed under a pair of ladder rungs to conceal them.

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A Cool Cellar Steve Hughes, 2010

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Monitoring the temperature and humidity in a new cellar is important to knowing how the passive cooling is working so I purchased a digital thermometer with wireless remote sensors. This gives readings of the humidity as well, and allows for readouts of three separate sensors. I set up one sensor in the cellar, another out near the vineyard, and the one built in to the display gives the interior temperature of the house, outside of the cellar. With temperature differentials on the exterior down to the high thirties, and getting as high in the house as mid 80s from solar gain, the cellar hasnt changed more than a few degrees staying very constant between 57F to 60F. While the lighting creates the ambiance I was looking for, it also puts off a fair amount of heat. One morning I noticed the temperature in the cellar was about 4 degrees higher than the night before, and realized I had left the lights on. 10. The Door Keeping with the more rustic cedar theme, I decided to build the door from select tight knot cedar 2x6s that I hand selected at the lumber yard for straightness. I ploughed a 1/4 groove along the edges and inserted a 1/4 plywood spline into the grooves to glue the 2x6s together. The doorknob edge was then planed slightly at a 5 angle to allow the door to swing past the jamb and keeping a close reveal when closed. Sanding the door slab with several graduating grades of sand paper from 60 grit down to 220 grit prepares the door for sanding sealer and a couple nish coats of satin polyurethane. I cut a small diamond shape hole at eye level in the door and inserted a burgundy color piece of stained glass. An unanticipated benet to this is I can easily spot when Ive left the lights on and take the long walk down the hall to turn them off.
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On the inside of the door, I glued and screwed some 1x6 oak straps to help hold the door together. Oak button plugs in the screw holes also embellished the door in the rustic theme. The piece de resistance of the cellar door was the application of some raku-glazed tiles my wife made with motifs of our winemaking lives. The tile on the top represents our view of Mt. Rainier, to the left a bottle and glass with our winery name, on the right, our hillside vineyard and below the red glass diamond, the trees of Three Tree Point, where we live and the namesake of our little operation. I explored various options for mounting these tiles to the door and ended up applying a dot of silicone sealant to each corner on the backs of the tiles, then turning them over onto a piece of waxed paper on the counter. When dry, the silicone effectively created rubber leveling buttons. Then to secure them with a mounting hardware that was as inconspicuous as possible, I found that some copper plumbing pipe hooks worked perfectly driven into the door on each side of the tile. I held my hand on the tiles while hammering the hooks into the door to ensure I would not smash her hard work over a hot kiln. Now stocked with the 2007 and 2008 vintages of our wines and the select commercial wines in our collection, the cellar is always an enjoyable space to enter. The aroma of cedar, the quiet afforded by the insulation, the near perfect humidity of 60 to 65%, and the soft lighting on the bottles of wines surrounds the senses like a warm blanket and a re on a frosty winter night and causes us to linger while we contemplate the perfect bottle to have with dinner or to share with friends.

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A Cool Cellar Steve Hughes, 2010

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