I am late but know a decent amt on the topic. I may have missed it but what temp range is your goal here. If under 65 maybe. I would not bank on staying below that. I have a passive cellar on North side at 8,000 elevation in CO where soil year round temp was 52. Floor was 10 ft under grade. Part of finished space and well insulated etc. Still got up into lower 60s and we never saw outside temps about 80/83 degrees. So 65 in Mass I think is about best case. That may be fine.
Pretty sure a cabinet will end up being cheaper if you put in proper insulation, rip our wood flooring, and the vapor barrier etc. But it is a fun project. If you do read Gold’s book for sure.
Yeah, rubber on top of wood would be just about a perfect insulator.
Work your way down to the cold stuff, and see what it has to offer.
[Again, though, the New Englanders were doubtless thinking that they wanted the rubber over wood insulator to keep things warm in the wintertime, so you’d be undoing all their handiwork.]
Yeah, the rubber may have been put there to keep moisture from evaporating up into the house.
OTOH, you do want cold AND moist for a proper wine cellar.
If it is cold & moist without the rubber, then I’d urge you to use exterior grade components in framing the room - pressure treated studs & plywood [green] rather than white wood, stainless fasteners [screws] rather than painted fasteners, Hardiepanel rather than drywall, exterior grade plaster rather than interior grade drywall mud, and of course an exterior grade paint.
Here’s why I think you’ll have a problem keeping a decent temperature, David.
This is the temperature of the floor at the corner of my wine room. At this point, the room is about 6 feet below grade, and this is the northwest corner of the house, yet the infrared temp gun says the floor is 59.5F. And we’ve only had 10 days or so of really warm weather.
The other parts of the floor are warmer, as are the walls, and ceiling is 64F. So the air temp is up to 65F.
My floor just isn’t cold enough to bring down the temps, even though my room is much larger than yours, so there’s much more floor relative to the other surfaces in mine.
