storage

Six on Saturday | 28th October 2023

A year and a month ago, I shared a weekend project where I added shelving to our root cellar which had been sitting unused under the house for a good couple of decades. Since I’ve finished storing most things in the root cellar this autumn, it seemed a good time to catch up on how it’s worked out this past year!

1. The stairway downstairs, with temperatures warmer than the basement but cooler than the house proper. This also happens to be the perfect place to store onions (hanging along the wall) and baskets of apples (in the corners). Last winter, we had a big box of apples stashed here for over six months in perfect condition that provided not only convenient fruit but a lovely aroma as you went down the stairs.

2. The view from the door into the root cellar. The small shelves attached to the wall on the left came with the house. I installed the middle set of three shelves last year. The set of three more shelves to the right was installed this past spring. I’m considering taking out the small shelves next year and lengthening the middle set of shelves, as well as adding another set along the wall to the right of the door, to give the whole room a more uniform appearance. That is, if the shelves don’t end up being discontinued, which seems to be a real concern at the moment.

3. Anything that does better in cold storage is kept down here. That includes jars of various canned preserves and juices, dried herbs, packaged items from the store, and baskets of root vegetables.

4. Spare jars, pots, dormant bulbs, and overwintering plants are along this side.

5. This year, I’m storing my garden carrots in this big bin filled with potting moss. It keeps them from drying out, which was the main problem I had last year when I kept them out in mesh baskets like the potatoes.

6. You can see in the pictures from last year that I originally was keeping my potatoes in cute little rattan baskets. This proved to be an epically bad idea, as the material soaked in too much moisture and started molding after only a few weeks, ruining the entire batch of potatoes inside it. Everything ended up going straight into the compost heap and I ordered these metal mesh baskets to store anything that remained. They have been enormously useful for all sorts of purposes over the year and are now back on potato duty for their second winter.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

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.