new cellar doors

In the twenty-five years tending this property,  this is the third new set of outside cellar doors.  This time, instead of a board overlapping the center joint, which both covered the slit and strengthened the right side door, I braced both doors underneath (ouch! those metal 5-foot pieces cost $17 each) and used only an aluminum weather strip to cover the crack between the doors.  And, I added a lifting handle.  Final coat of paint yet to be applied.

next, the first floor

Say good-bye to the cellar as the floor covers it. Notice the large opening in the cellar wall? The non-electric house will use that to bring sunlight in, down through a huge window well--common practice I'm told. Even church services are held in such basements. While the house is going up, though, we'll use a Japanese electric generator for power. It's lunch time, and the carpenters drop their tool belts.

Rat in the cellar

I post this reluctantly...hopping many are out of town for an end of summer vacation. Several week ago I called our pest company and asked them to analyse a hole in the cellar, freshly dug, right next to the cnetures-old stone wall.

After two service calls, they determined that it was a rat hole and two deadly traps were set. It seems that the outside cellar doors had been left open overnight and a wandering rodent checked us out.

Now there are two possibilities--that our investigation, our plugging up the hole, our placing of traps at two places, has scared the rodent away; or, that the critter is lying low, waiting for the dust to settle. In either case, we've got it covered. Well, I'm not letting the dust settle. We're doing a full-court press. The outside door is being closed. And all manner of things will be well, as the saint said--not for the rat but for us.

That's organic peanut butter as bait on the trap.

dirt cellar woes

Here's a photo from about 1960 of our place. The original stone house was built after 1825. We know that because it never had a fireplace. The Franklin stove, which made the fireplace unnecessary, arrived in the Monterey area after 1825. So I like to think our 18 inch think stone walls were there since 1835.

It was probably built as a retirement house for the Eby family farm behind it. The addition to the house is a late 19th century wooden structure, circa 1890. The barn was built by my father in 1954, with a little help from me. Much of its timber frame was taken from the previous barn.

The house was also built over a spring. It has been dry since at least 1951 when my parents bought the property, the the hole was always there and serves as a french drain (a plain hole in the ground).

All this to say, that having a 19th century dirt floor in your cellar is very "green," but comes with a bit of a cost. This year we've been aware of two.

1. Is borderline level of radon in the house coming from the earth?

2. If we laid concrete would that solve our rodent problem in the cellar?

Details later.