I was surprised to see, during my research last year, that there isn’t much here on working with Joseph & Curtis, which are, for my money, builders of the best-looking wine cellars out there. You can see their pics widely on Houzz (where I found them) and also on their Facebook and Instagram pages.
The cellar is now done, and I documented the process in pics and wanted to share it here for anyone thinking about installing a significant cellar. This will be a bit different than the usual cellar build threads, because the work is already done, and I’m moved in. But I’ll try to take you through it step by step over several days. Also, I did not DO any of this work. We had it built for us, but managed the entire process closely. More on this below and throughout the thread.
To note: the only relationship I have with the company is that I paid them handsomely to build my cellar. I am getting nothing for this post.
An interesting complexity in our project is that J&C is based in New Jersey and does most of its working the NY / NJ area. I live in the Chicago area. I never met them. We talked on the phone a lot. But they never saw my space in person. Essentially, I GC’d the project, and had a solid carpenter who did much of the work (thankfully) but I had to coordinate all the other tradespeople. And we had every single tradesman in that room that would have worked on building a new house from scratch. All for one room.
A tiny bit about me: I am the opposite of handy, and I’m really busy running a consulting practice, with absolutely no time or ability to build something like this out myself. Even if I wanted to, and had the time, I have absolutely zero talent for doing this kind of thing. But researching the right contractor and paying for things to get done – THIS I am good at!
Here is the before picture – this was used as an office. The room is 17x15, and as you can see it had four windows AND a fireplace.
I think you can click on these pics to see them bigger.
And here a couple pics of the end result. As built, it holds around 2,900 bottles:
In the rest of the thread, I’ll take you through our goals for the cellar, how we planned what we wanted, the entire process. If you have questions, feel free to ask.