A Weekend Project

So. Much. Storage.

Root cellars. I love the idea, but in practice, it’s taken me a bit longer to get the hang of them. Like all farmhouses of a certain age, ours had one built into the basement as a matter of course. We saw it, along with a vintage loom and spinning wheel, while poking around downstairs very early on. Then I sort of let that knowledge drift to the back of my mind for the next several years. It was always either too cold, too dark, or too damp to feel like making a trip down there, it seemed. Especially when there was a perfectly serviceable pantry and freezer to store most of our food in.

Then I started getting into making juices and jams from all the fruit we would pick every autumn and before I knew it, there was no more room on the shelves in the kitchen and my jars had started taking up an alarming amount of space in the laundry cabinet. Add to that a particularly generous haul of potatoes from the garden this year, and I was in dire need of storage space. It was time to rethink the root cellar.

I cleaned up a bit before the delivery guy got there, so this isn’t even that bad anymore.

As you might imagine, the place didn’t look too hot after a few-cough-several decades of neglect. Luckily, we are talking about what is basically a hole in the ground. In this case, a quick sweeping of the walls and floor pretty much got it into serviceable shape.

Courtesy of a certain Nordic furniture and home goods superstore.

I went with a sturdy-looking outdoor shelving unit made from acacia wood, making sure it was expandable since I fully plan to line all the walls in the next few years. One day spent building, then the next was spent scurrying up and down the stairs, feeling like a very industrious hamster amalgamating my stash.

At the time of writing, I have only about half the shelves filled. There is still a harvest of carrots to bring in and some apples to wrap up, so that will be taking up more space in the weeks to come. How this will all hold up during the winter, when temps drop well below freezing, will be the real test. Not for the root cellar, perhaps, since it has been here for better part of a century, but definitely for me getting down there to grab things for daily use. Hopefully, making it a little more organized will help!

The view from the other corner, showing the double wooden doors for extra insulation.

Reboot

This is not my first blog and it will probably not be my last. It is, however, the first one that I have started with some sort of intent and organization. Blame it on the quarantine.

A little more than 10 years ago, we moved into a very typical example of a postwar Finnish farmhouse. It came complete with a barn, farmland, wells, and a greenhouse. While this was exactly the sort of place I’d always dreamed of living in, neither of us had the experience or background to know what to do with it. So for the next several years, everything was pretty much allowed to run wild. Save for some rudimentary lawnmowing, and we were just happy to get a bonus crop of fruit every year from our trees.

Then, lockdown came. I started looking out the kitchen window and actually had time to consider all the things I could do out there. And then, even more surprisingly, I actually started doing it. So this blog is about that process.