A great frugal tool, when it comes to feeding your family. Let me give you two examples of how having a cellar saves me money.
1. In October 2010, DH, the kids and I went to an orchard and picked 4 bushels of apples. Now, 4 bushels is a lot of apples! I made one bushel into applesauce, which I canned. Another 1/4 bushel or so got made into apple chips, also known as dehydrated apples. The rest got stored for fresh eating and holiday pies. Those apples, from the orchard, came out to 48 cents a pound. We didn't get no cheapy varieties, either. We got tasty, useful ones, like Cortland, Empire and Granny Smith. Especially Granny Smith, those are DH's favorite apples. They cost $1.69 a pound at the grocery store, and those are ones that have been sprayed, buffed, waxed to pretty perfection, shipped from Washington state, and accumulate bruises along the way. The Granny Smiths in my cellar, the 48 cent a pound ones, were handpicked by my family, taken carefully right from the tree, brought home with a minimal amount of bruising, no spraying, no buffing, and no waxing. By the way, a bushel of apples weighs approximately 48 pounds. So, for my two bushels of Granny Smiths, I paid about $42. To get the same two bushels from the grocery store, at $1.69 a pound would have cost me $160. What do you think? Was it worth it to have a cellar that those apples stayed good in until we'd eaten them all up by March?
2. In 2007, I had the opportunity to buy potatoes for $8 a bushel. A bushel of potatoes weighs 50 pounds. That comes out to a price of 16 cents a pound. At that time, a 10-pound bag of potatoes in the store was $2.99 on sale, and I can't remember what the non-sale price was (because I only bought on sale, lol). That means, at $2.99 per 10 pounds, I would have paid $14.95 to get 50 pounds of potatoes (5 10-pound bags). Savings: $6.95 per 50 pounds. I got 150 pounds, or 3 bushel. My family of five ate potatoes for about four months, and not one potato got rotten, because potatoes love being stored in a cool cellar versus a warm kitchen cupboard.
Have I pleaded the frugality of a cellar enough? Do you want one of your own? There are several ways you can make one. Do an internet search for 'cellar' or 'cellar plans' and you'll have hours worth of reading at your disposal.
Let me tell you about how my cellar came to be.
When we were building this little place here, plans called for a covered porch that was the length of the front of the house. Building code required that this porch have footers poured at four feet below ground level. In other words, we would have to excavate the length of the house, the width of the porch (7 feet, if I remember right), and a depth of four feet, in order to be allowed to build this porch.
DH, who had purchased a used backhoe to excavate the basement of the house (rather than hire a professional excavator to do the digging for us at a cost greater than the old backhoe), got the idea that if we had to dig down four feet, why not go a full eight, which was the depth of the basement anyway, and have a cold cellar under our front porch.
I of course thought this was a most excellent idea. Quite a bit of the width of the proposed cellar was all ready at eight feet deep because of the hole excavated for the basement being larger than the actual basement footprint, so that there was room to work down there and also to lay drain tile around the foundation of the house. We had the backhoe, we had to dig anyway, so why fill in 4' of most of the hole while digging it just a few feet wider? Why not take those few extra feet all the way down to what was all ready the bottom of the hole? What was a little more time and fuel (in reality, not much more at all) to double the depth and gain cold storage? So that is what we did.
Once we had the hole dug, and the footings poured, we needed to form the walls for the cellar. One long wall was all ready done, as it was the basement wall. That was built with insulated concrete forms (aka ICFs,) which were fairly new technology at the time and were pretty much hollow white Styrofoam Lego blocks that you stacked together, interlocking them, and poured cement into to form a wall that didn't need any additional insulation.
the "Lego" House
(door opening in long wall is where the cellar door will be)
For the other long wall, and the two short ones, we used cinder blocks and mortar. Now we had a long rectangle, with a door located in the basement wall at the end of the basement stairs.
cellar walls completed
(note, any part of the cinderblock walls that would be below final grade were covered on the outside with a waterproof backing as seen in corner of cellar)
After that, we framed the roof of the cellar, making rafters of 2" x 6"s,
looking down into the cellar from outside ( standing at what will be approximately finished grade)
looking up from inside of cellar
Over the rafters, we put corrugated steel sheeting to keep out of the cellar any rain water that would drip down between the floorboards of the front porch. It is on a steep enough angle (thanks to the rafters) that any water runs right off and into what would later be flowerbeds.
The raised ends of the steel got sealed with spray foam insulation to keep critters and outside air from entering the cellar. On the underside of the steel sheeting, inside the cellar, DH put 1" thick foam insulation board.
insulation
Where the top of the short walls and the steel sheeting didn't meet, DH blocked in with lumber. On the south end, he drilled out two 4" holes and inserted PVC pipe into them. They are my vents for the cellar: they have grilled covers on the outside (with old pantyhose stretched over the pipe, under the cover, to act as a screen for bugs), one pipe has an elbow and a extension running nearly to the floor--the cold air inlet, and the other enters and sticks straight out a few feet into the cellar--the warm air 'exhaust'. Both PVC pipes, on the inside of the cellar, have removable caps. In the fall, when the nights get cool and I want to reduce the temperature of my cellar faster, I can take off the caps of both pipes. The warm air at the top of the cellar flows out, while cooler night air flows in, being deposited near the cellar floor. During the day (and anytime I want the temp to be steady) I put the caps back on.
warm air outlet pipe on left, cold air return on right
The floor of the cellar we left dirt. Clay, actually, as that is the native soil at this little place here. Over that we spread pea gravel, which in reality was mostly in that area anyway, having been the cover for over the drain tile that ran the perimeter of our house. Having a dirt floor saves money (versus pouring cement), and also lets natural humidity into the cellar. The floor retains a moistness, but has never gotten muddy or squishy.
The pressure tank for the well is also located in the cellar.
DH built a set of shelving using some reclaimed lumber. (More of that deck I told you about in the Free Lumber post--the first old deck we were given). I keep mostly canned good on the shelves, as you can see.
I have acquired, through the years, a number of wooden 1/2 bushel baskets. These are where I store my potatoes, and also apples when we pick a quantity of them for storage.
I also keep a thermometer in my cellar. The warmest it has ever been is 62 degrees during a prolonged hot spell in the summer, and the only time it got close enough to the freezing point that I left the light on in there to add some heat was during the January several years ago when we spent all month with a outdoor high temperature that never got above 30 degrees. Average summer temp in the cellar is 55 degrees, and most of the winter it is a nice 40-42 degrees, making it a perfect substitute refrigerator. In the spring, when it's just starting to get warmer down there, it's a great place to cold ferment a batch of lager for two months. (Any homebrewers reading this blog? We've been brewing since 2000. . .)
I love my cellar. It's like my own personal grocery store, only I don't need to take any money with me when I go shopping in it!
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