I have always fancied having a cellar, it would be great to have a cool dark space to store the tattie harvest, jam, wine and assorted ‘stuff’.
Building a cellar under the house would have cost an astronomical amount of money and just wasn’t an option so I decided to build a standalone cellar a short distance away from the house. I found it difficult to find much information about how to build a cellar. Searching on the internet tends to bring up two slightly different types of cellar – 1 very fancy wine cellars that can be installed in or under your house which are installed by professionals or 2 – survivalist shelters which are for stocking up with tins of food and ammunition in preparation for the day that the government comes to get you (usually American based information!), neither of which is quite what I was wanting. There must be good knowledge somewhere about building root cellars and ice houses but I suspect that the people who successfully built these are either not on the internet or lived 150 years ago and so are long dead.
Here then is an account of how I built a cellar for anyone that is interested. It will probably follow as a series of posts on this thread as I get round to writing it and to avoid a massive post.
I am not a structural engineer and a real engineer might be horrified by some of what follows!
Unfortunately I was a bit lax at taking photos of the process so there are not as many as there should be.
Overview.
Basically I dug a hole, built a concrete tunnel in the hole then backfilled earth over it so about half the cellar is below ground level and half above. The bit above ground is insulated with a thick layer of soil and so appears as a grassy mound with a door in it. Not too unlike a hobbit house.