Over the last few months, we’ve been sharing our home and lives with you. But, we have a dirty little secret. Well, actually we have a few, but we don’t want to shock you too much, so we’ll just start with this one for now.
We have a cellar! And in our case, it really is a dirty secret as it’s absolutely filthy.
We store a few things down there, but we can’t really use the space because it’s so damp. Any wood and cardboard that we have down there turns mouldy within a few weeks. Even the labels on paint cans start peeling.
Altogether we have 3 cellar rooms that are located under one half of the house. The access is through a door at the back of the kitchen.
The first small cellar room is at the front of the house. It’s full of junk and a complete mess.
We can’t use the middle cellar room at all. It’s very, very damp. It doesn’t have a floor and sometimes even floods when it’s been raining a lot.
The largest room (located under the kitchen) is also very damp. It’s not quite as bad as the other rooms, but also needs to be completely refurbished.
As you can see, it’s a complete mess. Now you know why we’ve been hiding it! We think it’s going to be a huge amount of work (and money) to sort out the cellar. Everything will need damp proofing, we need new windows, a floor, new electrics and heating and we would like to move the boiler that is currently located in the fourth bedroom down here. I think we’re going to have our work cut out! There is so much to do, that we don’t know where to start and keep putting our cellar renovation off.
Do you have a secret space that you’ve been hiding? Or any other secrets you’d like to get of your chest? We’d love to hear them!
I have a “garage” that I use for storage, that is also very damp. Last summer, because I thought it would be safe in summer, I stored a little table there. When I brought it back home, the difference of humidity level made the top all wavy in a night. I tried saving it by stocking heavy dictionaries and objects on it for two months! I also have a shed in the garden that is in such a pitiful state that I discovered last month that a mole had made a hole in the floor!!!
Wow! That makes me feel better about our damp cellar. Loving that you have your own mole!
Cx
I’m not a basement maven, but if it’s that damp and floods in rain, shouldn’t you have an automatic sump pump in there?
I also wonder about your plan to move the boiler or have any other utility equipment down there where it could get flooded.
We’re not quite sure what to do with the basement at the moment. It will probably need damp proofing and possibly tanking. It very rarely floods and if it does, it’s only 1 or 2 cm, so not too bad. It just means that we can’t store much down there. We have already had a (very expensive) quote to move the boiler and it didn’t seem to be a problem. Thanks for the advice, will definitely be checking if we need a sump pump!
Cx