Here you go Scott,
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Very nice Martin. I see that style of plaster/ stone bins is used in European cellars regularly but have never seen them in North America. Did you put this in or was it completed previously. I wonder if that style is still common in new builds?
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Chris,
My cellar was done when we renovated our house so indeed done by me but in an old house (built 1924). Very easy to build as this is done with some lightweight concrete elements and mortar. Then ‘polished’ off with more mortar so all this done in a day with the help of a professional guy. Cheap too so more money for wine 
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Yeah, but you have a mechanism for getting some of that out of your hair besides through your liver!
Mine did…sheetrock too! ![[highfive.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/d/db21b9263a9105e51f6f8b11e61dd4de095611f9.gif "highfive"){kind=small}
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I have ten left thumbs and stand in awe at these projects.
There was one project that I have seen here in the past and I forget the name of the thread or the person who made the cellar, but someone did a gravel floor, under the house, 4 feet tall cellar complex that I just fell head over heels for.
Kudos to the oeno-builders!!
These make me want to own my own home.
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Or their homes!
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outstanding
the first thing my wife and I did was hand dig a tunnel and slab it and air condition it at 16 degrees celsius in Australia
looks similar
Mt humble passice cellar when I was about done and ready for the racking.
Did all the work myself, framing, insulation, rocks (with the helps of a true stone worker).
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
Thank you S u z a n n e!!!
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If we’re collecting them here, here’s the thread on my build.
What do you mean by that?
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It’s a “self-made man” pun 
Then call me dimwitted!
Hi Guys,
Over on the lessons learned thread I posted that one of my personal lessons is that you don’t need to be a billionaire or even to construct your own wine cellar to store your wine in great condition at a proper temperature and as proof of this the LCBO staff have often marveled at the pristine condition of my exchanges and returns.
So somebody asked me for a picture of my “storage area.” Ha. This is an overly generous description. I live on the first floor of a sturdy but older house built in the semi-sunken style you would normally see in a warmer climate like Arizona or Vancouver. There is no door to close off the floor and no deep stairwell leading to my floor, just 4 small steps. So I live slightly below ground and my landlord and his wife both live slightly above ground. The house doesn’t even have a furnace but is heated by gas via discretely placed fan blowers built into the walls and decorative fireplaces with built-in blowers so they double as heaters as well. All of this is controlled by a modern electronic thermostat. Odd system but it works.
The house is a rectangular shape, or as I like to call it, a shoebox. The kitchen bookends one room and the living room bookends the other. The middle portion contains the bedroom and bathroom on the right hand side and one very long narrow hallway so that I can get from the kitchen to the living room.
At first, like most people getting started in this hobby, I just stored the wine in a cool dark closet back when it was just a few boxes. Of course the collection grew and I thought for a long time about investing in a wine fridge. I was about to do it and even asked board member Mike Grammer about details on his and where he got it.
Then I started reading up on passive wine storage and got hit by a curious thought: with heat running from both ends of the space, plus the bedroom and bathroom on the side, you’d think the heat would travel through the narrow hallway with all that hot blowing air from both ends and the majority of one side. It doesn’t. There seems to be 4 heat “bubbles” that never seem to intersect. Which is why the hallway always seemed colder than either end of the floor. Would there be a chance that its microclimate would actually be good for storing wine? I’m no structural engineer but I believe this to be a design flaw that has unexpectedly worked in my favor as you will see in the photos below:
My “storage racks” are just recycled cardboard wine boxes whose top flaps I’ve cut off. I stack them in two’s and never higher. My landlord is actually a pretty good handyman and at one point we were going to build some shelves to line the hallway but then decided against it because the boxes which were supposed to be a temporary solution were doing a much more efficient storage than anything we could’ve built together. Does it look pretty? No. Does it awe everyone as a sight who has seen it and remarked that I should open my own wine store? Yep.
But here’s the kicker: the thing that finally convinced me to just use the hallway as my storage was that out of sheer curiosity I bought a standard inexpensive fridge thermometer one day and decided to actually measure the temperature in the hallway. As you can see, it’s a perfect 15 degrees Celsius. No matter if it’s summer or winter, whether I have the heat or the air conditioning going, it always hovers in the 7-18 degree Celsius range. The lowest I have seen it go was 4 degrees on a particularly brutally cold night two winters ago (which were one of the two harshest in a row ever experienced in Ontario, Canada).
In the last four years, I have never seen that dial lower than 4 degrees or higher than 19 degrees no matter how hot or cold it is outside or what amount of heat or air conditioning is running throughout the house. And I have tested literally every inch of the hallway from top to bottom and nary a fluctuation. That close up pic? That’s the last box in my collection and it’s just 4 feet away from the fireplace and blower I was telling you about and never have I ever cooked a bottle.
Now if I had children or pets there might be a safety concern that would prompt me to invest in a better and much safer option like a professional wine fridge. Since it’s just me, why bother? I couldn’t have planned this out better if I’d tried. For God’s sake, my hallways stores wine in better condition than the LCBO stores themselves! I know, I brought the fridge magnet with me into a store once out of curiosity to measure the temperature. They’re a heck of a lot warmer than my hallway. So that one worked out pretty well. But I’ve actually got more wine than what’s stored in the hallway. So I’ll cover that in my next post.
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Yes, I know I have posted these pics before, but perhaps they will be of value to some reader.
My wine closet is in the northeast corner of our basement, poured concrete foundation on 3 walls, with drywall and door on the fourth, and about 7’ of its 8’ height is underground. Temperature varies from about 55F (February, at the floor) to 70F (August, near the ceiling), but obviously changes quite slowly with the seasons.
The racks were built out of pine planks (1x10s and 1x12s (inches)), each row essentially being a box with vertical dividers staggered so that I can screw each to the one below as I place it on top. Then the whole is screwed to vertical 2x4s attached to the wall. The first row is tilted backward with a 1x1 at the bottom front, so the bottles tilt back at about 10 degrees; each row looks cantilevered over the one below.
Each bin holds from 14-20 compatible bottles, cataloged in CT. The closet is approx 35 square feet (just under 6x6 feet), and currently houses about 1200 bottles:
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That’s cool Steve.
Steve, highly efficient setup. Well done. How do you have the bottles setup in terms of organization?