I have built a wine cellar in every house that I bought. This is the first time I got to start with a clean slate. Slate is indeed the word: I sat on a skid-mounted 500 lb jackhammer for an entire day to dig this down 4 feet deeper.	For all the skeptics, note that I actually own a level and even use it, on occasion.
She gets my vote for hod carrier of the year.	Several cores had rebar inserted into holes drilled in the floor. Concrete was then poured into those cores. At the end of two days, we had three courses up.
The heat became brutal as the northeast reached 90F almost every day. We generally put up a course in the morning, stopped for lunch and a siesta, and put up a second course late in the afternoon.	By the end of July, we had 10 courses reaching 6'8". This is the final block being nudged into place.
On 19 August we poured the floor of the cellar and the roof of the wine cellar using a fiber reinforced concrete. There was so much extra concrete that we poured an apron in front of the garage and filled a couple sonotubes to be used for piers on the deck. This rather dark picture was taken inside the wine cellar as I stripped off the forms. That is not a cane, although I felt as if I needed one. It's a wrecking bar.

Jump to: the next phase | the new house page | Our Geocities home page | KC Travel Site

Last updated 26 Aug 99