Poly-Iso is open cell. You would be better off with Polyurethane boards aka EPF or foamular the pink or blue stuff.
Note to self - hire Kravitz when it’s time to begin cellar construction!
You’re right. My bad.
Thank you all for your responses.
First I apologize for this LONG-WINDED response post. Below are my “rambling” thoughts concerning this whole damn thing.
I expect construction to last five weeks but I really think it will be closer to six or seven.
I have thought about keeping it here in the house. Right now that idea is pretty high on my list. The only room that I could put a new AC in is upstaires. If the weather gets hot I don’t think a window AC will be able to do the job.
I am thinking about just putting the bottles on the floor in the living room (which is adjacent to the wine room) and just hoping we don’t get any 90° weather. That seems to be the easiest solution. I’d pull out the more expensive bottles and put them in a close-by self storage place. This idea is sounding better by the minute. I could put a tent up in that room that would have a cooling unit in it. I even might be able to take the existing system into the tent. If I do this I’ll send out a notice and anyone who would like to drink a bottle or two from my stash could come over and help.
The idea of parking a refrigerated truck or container in our driveway sounded good to me until I found out that the refrigeration unit is really noisy. We live in a small “bowl” and I don’t think the neighbors would be very happy about that.
I’m still considering VinFolio though. If the insurance would pay for it VinFolio would make an inventory. For seven years now I’ve been trying to get everything in to Cellartracker. Right now only about half the bottles are in CellarTracker. I just never have the time to get everything inventoried.
ERIC, Is VinFolio’s system compatible with CT? If so that would be a great reason to use VinFolio.
If I don’t go with VinFolio I’d probably go with Joe at Subterraneum although that’s a lot of bottles that have to be taken up the long staires.
I think that the best thing to do would be to replace the whole floor. I mean… If the insurance company will pay for the job, why not? The person who I would like to do the job is the people who built the cellar in the first place. I’m comfortable with them and I don’t think what happened is their fault.
When I do pull the wine I think I’ll have five catagorys. #1/Ordinary bottles to send to storage. #2/More expensive bottles that require special handling. #3/Bottles I want to send to auction. #4/Bottles that I want to keep here for everyday consumption. And #5/Bottles that the work crew and I drink while we’re moving the wine out.
As far as taking it up to my neighbor’s (Joe T.) what we should really do is build a cave between the two houses.
Off subject to Randy; What I really need is a competitive commission rate from you guys.
Chris; Yes, It is a Paul Wyatt cellar. I’ve talked to Paul and he’ll come here and take it apart. He thinks that there will be very little damage and if some damage occurs he has the parts to replace it.
It appears that the damage was caused by a broken water main. The water main to our home broke. It was just outside the front of the house. It had been raining for the better part of the week so we thought nothing of our “squishy” front yard. After the rain stopped it wasn’t until a week later that we wondered why the yard was still squishy. Then a guy from PG&E came to the door wondering why we had used almost double of what we normally used. Finally we figured out something was wrong; found the leak and fixed it. What we didn’t know was that the water had soaked under the foundation and what it was doing to the joists.
Now… Add insult to injury…
I had noticed walking in the cellar that the floor seemed to be going downhill near the back wall. It was very little and I didn’t think much of it. About three weeks later theres a fairly large crack in the tile floor. That’s when I called my contractor who had put the cellar foundation in. Because one of the tiles had a huge crack in it we figured we would take that tile out and see if we could figure out what was happening. We go looking for where the water under the house was coming from. No leaky pipes, no high humidity from the cellar temp unit… We go outside and dig up the dirt next to where most of the moisture was coming from. Yikes! There right up against the outside wall was a garden sprinkler that was supposed to water the plants in that area. Some gardener had decided that the cement foundation shouldn’t show and had piled on some dirt to make it look better. Well, he piled the dirt burying by six inches the sprinkler head. Whenever we watered the lawn that burried sprinkler head was pouring water out into the dirt right where the back wall of the cellar is. Damn!
So now we wait for the insurance company decides who is to blame. IMO they should have looked at it for five minutes and then gave the go-ahead. I’m worried now because five weeks later they are still telling me to wait. Sometime soon my litigious mind will start thinking about ways to hurry this fixing along.
I will say that I never thought about trucking the stuff to a winery and storing the wine there. There are a half dozen places that I’m sure they would do this for me. And that is a simple and low-cost solution. Thank you Fred Bower! But first I want to know what the insurance company says about the bid from VinFolio. I really like the idea of getting my inventory up to date and completed.
One last thing… Does anyone know of or have a connection to a place that I could buy boxes cheap/wholesale. I could use some direction in this. No matter what I’m going to need some ±375 boxes that will fit the grand-cru burgundy bottles.
Well technically you would be moving from CT to Vinfolio. If and when you wanted to come back, you can send me the Excel export from VinCellar. Then you can do a bulk import based on that. (I would wipe out your current CT inventory.) You would have to spend several hours on it (depends upon how many unique wines you have), but if you are only halfway inventoried you would end up in a much better place when it’s all done.
Eric,
Thank you. That helps me decide. You know I want to do biz with you!
Thanks David.
FYI - they have a freight elevator that is big enough to handle pallets. They also have large carts that could handle at least 30 cases at a time.
Wow David you have a lot of wine! @ 2 lbs per bottle you have a load on your floor, 5+ tons. If your insurance company ponies up I would go with what they offer, but I really think Alan W. advice is the best solution as long as there is plenty of room to work under floor. I am a builder/remodeler in SoCal and we do this type of thing all of the time.
Big, big job moving all your wine out, removing all built-ins, flooring, etc. If you consider it, go with a contractor that is totally confident in process.
I stress out when I have to inventory, put away 3 or 4 cases of wine.
thanks for the vote of confidence, Tom. I have been a bit surprised that David and others didn’t even comment on my suggestion and recommendation. I’ve been through a similar problem and even recommended a company that could evaluate/fix the problem.
alan
Boxes… http://www.ebeaver.com/
I use the flats, two rows of six bots per row, with plastic inserts. Grand cru Burgs no problem.
grand crus are no problem w/any box. Put every other one neck up and the other six neck down. They’ll fit easily in virtually any box and I even prefer the smaller ones since they take up less space.
alan
David - Just a thought but maybe you can look at this another way. I’m not sure of the house/cellar construction but perhaps the way you should be looking at solving this problem is the do the repair while leaving the wine in-place, by using alternative construction methods and/or materials (steel beam vs. wood, etc.). As someone that’s been in engineering and construction for 25 years, I’d start by approaching the problem that way rather than the time, inconvenience and cost of moving the wine. Let me know if I can be of any assistance.
I used to be in fire restoration business, and insurance companys would drop mobile homes/structures on driveways/awns of hmes under construction. Have you considered renting a refer’d box and store it on your property. Could very well be cheaper than short term storage/transportation.
Another idea— find a recently closed business that had a walkin unit and make arrangements with landlord for short term usage, rental a uhaul and some responsible kids (tell them they each get 15% bonus at end of day if they dont break any bottles).
Third idea CELLAR DIMISHMENT PARTY!!!
David, is this problem the result of having a built in wine cellar or unrelated to wine cellar climate and function?
Rent a refrigerated sea shipping container. Have it dropped right in your drive way and plug it in. Probably your least expensive option.
I’ve worked on a lot of old houses. If your insurance company is paying for most/all just do it the thorough way (as they suggest) and replace any questionable material. It’s hard to tel from the description but it seems that your floor joists, sill, rim, and maybe subfloor are compromised. Dry rot is a fungus that can continue to grow, and presents the risk of spreading into currently unaffected (or new) wood. Even if you completely dry the currently compromised wood, you have some risk. You might be able to sister LVLs to the rotted joists, but if your subfloor is rotten it is virtually impossible to replace it without the move-out. If the subfloor is saveable, but the joists it is nailed to are shot you will probably have an issue transfering shear from the subfloor diaphragm to the new sistered joists as you can’t nail from above, even though the new joists will support the load. Seems like you’re in earthquake territory too and diaphragm nailing is important. An engineer would have to come up with some creative strategy of using a boastload of clips screwed from below. At anyrate it’s pretty tough for anyone to know the condition without seeing it. The reality though is that removal and replacement is the surest bet. It them becomes a matter of how much more that costs you (vs the insurer), including the moving of the wine.
As far as the wine it still seems early enough in the year to keep the lesser bottles on-site. Personally I’d get a bunch of boxes and some help to just pack up and truck out the most important half or so to a winery or offsite storage. Then again if you have such a cool cellar of so many bottles, saving $5 grand might not mean much to you.
he outlines what happened above.
Here’s what happened…
What John Gonzales said two post up is more than likely be the way I go.
Engineers from my insurance company and the contractor’s insurance company came up with the same findings separately. They say I have to move everything out. Believe me I kicked and screamed bloody murder but I think it is to no avail.
My insurance company is saying that they don’t want to put a bandaid. It is true that even if the wood in the cellar of the cellar shows no sign or rot they still want to remove it. They just don’t want to take the chance that something might linger and then having to do the same thing 10 years down the road.
As far as going in from the side of the house and trying to do it without removing the floor… I screamed MORE bloody murder but again to no avail. They don’t think that crawling under the house and putting all this stuff while laying on their back is both really really difficult and very very dangerous. I thought it would be a great idea if they dug out enough dirt under the house to where they could stand up… and… after the job was completed we could put up walls making it into a real cellar. That went over like a fart in a diving bell! I tried!
I gotta tell you how much I appreciate all of your posts. I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to answer everyone’s post individually. It’s a very busy time of the year for my business and adding the stress of this crap has become overwhelming. The insurance haven’t made up their mind and it has been over three weeks. The only thing I think is that they are trying to figure out a way where they don’t want to pay. Oh, Yuck!
Anyway… your posts here really lift my spirits; REALLY! I appreciate all the support. It shows that “crazy wine geeks” are some of the best people in the world.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
Thank you!