Advice for building a cellar

WINE TALK
1

Fellow countrymen -

This board has always offered great advice and suggestions - I’m hoping it won’t fail me now! I’m starting to think about building a cellar in my home and trying to get my head around how big to build, how much will it cost, how loud will it be, etc.

A few facts:

  1. I live in San Diego
  2. I am thinking 600-800 bottles (my current Vinotemp holds 450 and has 250 bottles in it)
  3. I don’t have a room to convert so I will need to be creative about space utilization

Do you have any vendor recommendations? Or, if you’ve done a project like this, can you give me a sense for cost of construction, racks, air conditioning, etc? This won’t be an over-the-top production - I just want to move from a cabinet to a more permanent solution.

Thanks for all your comments!
-Eric

2

Eric,
I fear this might be too vague of a question for folks to provide much real help. I might budget around 10k on the low end, but know you could easily sail past that amount. In my head, the two biggest factors that could change the total cost are what you mean by “creative space” as the impact on whatever room you’re carving away can be dramatic.

Also, the type of cooling system can greatly impact cost. Split systems are nicer than a modified through the wall solution, but also can run 4-5k versus 1k or less for a through the wall model.

Some of the questions you’ll want to think through have to do with how long you intend it stay in your home; are you thinking this cellar will add value to the house, or be something the next folks need to rip out. A show piece cellar in a nice house is semi-desirable, a merely functional room will be seen as a detractor for almost all future owners.

Does any of that help?

3

I built a 900 bottle cellar in my Sunnyvale garage for around $2200.
But I did all the work…

TTT

4

Some vague answers.

You probably want to carve out a space of 70+ sq/ft.

Several costs to keep in mind.
Room preparation…can you do this yourself? Materials aren’t expensive but it takes a lot of time.

Racking…decent kits start at about $2.50/bt (+install) custom is much more.

Cooling…lots of variables here…can you use an inexpensive thru the wall unit that vents heat and noise into an adjoining space?
Do you require a split system?

Will you do the work yourself? Sub it out yourself? Hire a pro?

The single most important factor to a successful wine cellar is to create an airtight & properly insulted room.

Where will the cellar be in relationship to your home?

5

Eric - if you don’t have a room to convert, where are you building it?

Do you have a basement?

Kris and the others gave you some things to think about.

For some people building a cellar is a really big deal and they even blog about it. If you grew up in the building business, it’s just an insulated closet that you do on Saturday afternoon.

If you’re hiring the work out, it’s a lot more expensive than if you do it yourself. But if you have no tools and you’ve never built anything, it’s probably worth hiring someone.

Then people pay a lot of money for the finishes - racking, etc., because that’s what they see. Actually they don’t - it’s full of bottles. But you can spend a lot of money on your racks and finishing touches.

Or you can do like I did and illuminate it with a bare bulb and build your own racks or bins out of 1x8 or 1x10s from the lumberyard. If you make bins, square or diamond, you maximize your storage space, but they’re inconvenient if every bottle in the bin is different. So depending on the racking, two cellars of equal size can hold very different numbers of bottles.

Figure that a Burgundy bottle is about 3 1/2 inches diameter. If you have individual racking, it’s about 3/4 inch wide, so for each bottle, you need 3.5 + .75 + .5 inch to give yourself some clearance, so you have about four and a quarter inches per bottle for length and width of your cellar. That’s not perfectly accurate because if you do individual racks, the vertical distance is a little different, but it gives you a rough idea. In bins, you save a lot of space. In a 10 X 5 ft X 7 ft cellar, that can be a difference of a hundred or more bottles.

While bins are great for efficient use of space, they suck for Burg/Rhone shaped bottles and they’re deadly for Turley/Pax/Beaujolais/fat ass bottles that don’t stack.

And your cooling system will cost you both to install and to run. So if you have any possibility of passive cellaring, that’s worth considering.

I built my own door, my own racks, and my own cellar and it cost me around $1000 for a space that holds 2000+ bottles. But I also grew up in the building business, have wired countless houses and offices, rebuilt my entire house myself, and have a table saw, mitre saw, routers, drills, and plenty of tools. For my shelves, I bought some plywood, ripped it, put a few coats of polyurethane on, and built shelves. If I had paid someone to do what I did, it would be several multiples of what I paid and that’s just for the most basic functional, stripped down cellar.

So a lot of your costs are going to come down to what you’re able to do and the final product you want. A good finish carpenter is a highly-skilled individual and if you want the work and can’t do it yourself, you’ll pay for those skills just like you pay a lawyer or dentist.

6

Eric, another thread touched on this as well. I built a similar room to what you want carved from my third car garage. I have a description and photos in this thread:

As Greg said, the cost depends on what you do yourself. I did a lot myself including assembling the larger racks. The ones on the right were added later from CostPlus. Total cost under $5K with cooling and racks. It was only a few man-days of labor if you hire a pro.

7

Eric, there is a lot of good advice on this board for DIY cellar builds as well as hiring out the work. Let us know which path you are considering and we can point you in the right direction. It’s hard to be specific without knowing who is doing the work.