Wine Cellar

It was a pretty quiet week at the Druffel house.  Justin was traveling all week and Edison and I just did our thing at home: swimming lessons, school for E, house projects for me, and plenty of time at the beach.  I only took one picture I feel is worthy of sharing.  We were having a sweet moment enjoying our coffee in our pajamas on the front porch. 

Since it was such a quiet week, I figured I would finally post pictures of the wine cellar.  This project took over a year to complete, mostly because we only worked on it on weekends while Edison was napping.  The wine cellar is the original root cellar of our 100+ year old house. It was previously used as an electrical and storage room.  It was also an amazing spider habitat.  It took us three years to figure out what we even wanted to do with the room because it was such an awkward space with all of the plumbing and electrical wiring in the house converging in the middle of the room.

There was also a bonus room off to the side - even scarier with more spiders than the first - that we didn't even know about when we bought the house.  We decided to turn the scary room into the wine cellar and the electrical room into a tasting room.  Here are the before and after pictures.

Wine cellar before

Wine cellar after

Stairs to nowhere before

Stairs to nowhere after

Tasting room before

Tasting room after

We reduced the awkwardness of the room by building two storage closets around the electrical and plumbing work.  The corner closet contains access to all of the electrical and the large one is just a giant closet.  It's seriously so big that we have furniture in there.  We maintained access to the plumbing with a small panel in the ceiling. 

I love the walls in this room the most.  We put did an antique paint (aka divorce paint) on the new sheetrock walls.  We left the board form concrete walls original, cleaned them up, and painted them a funky orange color with an antique finish.  The back wall is by far my favorite.  We bought some old wine barrels from the local winery, tore them apart, and then interlaced the staves to make the striped pattern.  Besides looking cool, they also make the whole room smell like wine. For the tile floor and doorway, we used mostly scrap tile from the rest of the house (the inlay in the floor is from a previous house) and purchased just enough to finish the project.  For the wine rack in the back, we bought salvage lumber from an old warehouse in Spokane and had a custom rack built to fit the length of the wall.  We intentionally went more rustic as we went farther back in the space.  

What I love most about the wine cellar, beyond the dramatic transformation of a previously disgusting space, is that it is nearly secret.  The entrance door is tiny and off to the side of the rest of the basement. Most people don't even notice it.  I also like that it makes a great entertaining space when we have friends over.  There is a giant play space on the other side of the stairs so the kids can play while the adults enjoy some adult time.