Building the Wine Room, September 1998

Now that we live in a house, rather than a city apartment, it was high time for my wine collection to be under the same roof. So with my parents coming to visit for a few weeks, and the currently-borrowed storage situation becoming less certain, September was the perfect time to build a wine room.

CAVEAT: I do not claim to be a wine cellar expert and the information here is intended for recreational purposes only.. I've read the seminal "How and Why to Build a Wine Cellar", but much of the content of that book was inapplicable given my location constraints. All I was really shooting for was a small air-tight space which was insulated to R-20 or above and temperature-controlled via a cooling unit. I strongly encourage anyone considering a wine cellar to do their research outside of this web site---including reading the aforementioned book.

The Space

The house is a classic 3-bed Raised Ranch, but the original owners built a two-story addtion on the end which contains a new master bedroom on top and a two-car garage on the bottom. This left the original built-in one-car garage as an unfinished storage room, which is where the wine room was built. The entire room measures 11'x18' with an 8' ceiling. The storage area is 3 feet below grade, with the outside wall consisting of foundation and R-11 insulated wall. The ceiling is finished, and is insulated (to R-19 or so I presume). All the interior walls are insulated to R-11. To save costs I decided to use two of the interior walls, leaving only two walls that needed to be framed. Here's how the original corner looked with the racking positioned to where it would eventually sit:

The back wall used to be the garage door, and the original owners built and insulated a wall two feet in from the garage door opening. On the other side of the wall is a workbench area which is inset from the new two-car garage.

The picture below gives it from a different angle so that you can see the outside foundation and wall:

The Materials

It took my father and I an entire morning to collect the following building materials for the room:

20 (or so) 2x4 studs
12 1x2 strapping boards
3 sheetrock panels
14 2x8 R-10 foam panels (2" thick)
2 rolls R-13 fiberglass insulation
8 tubes Liquid Nails for foam
4 tubes general caulking
1 roll foam sill-seal
2 flourescent shop-lights
2 braces for the cooling unit
1 insulated exterior door
1 box roofing buttons
3 indoor/outdoor thermometers
...plus other sundry hardware, etc.

The total came to approximately $500. Here's most of the inventory stacked in the garage:

To the left you can see the inset workbench area. That wall is the back wall of the cellar.

Prior to this I had mail-ordered the racking and the cooling unit. Click here for details on both of those items.

Onward

Construction of the wine room started on a Wednesday, and by Friday noon we were off to fetch the wine collection from the original cellar. There were still a few sundry things to do after that, so it's fair to say that construction took two and a half days, plus half a day to acquire the materials. Added to that was the day or so to build all the racking. Click here for detailed description of the construction.