1840 Farmhouse Root Cellar Part 1

[Music] just kidding our root cellar is not scary [Music] hello and welcome to the wardenburg family farm with don and brenda today you get to see us start our root cellar project that's going to be a fun one so come on down and join us okay before we start the project i want to finish a little investigation work see what we have here and the cold seller and i also need to clean it out so the cold cellar is six steps down lower than the basement and the basement is built with natural stone walls or limestone though um interesting here we have a old heavy iron post mounted in the wall and i suspect that was used for some kind of a pulley connected bringing out heavier materials so you have a little bit of repair work to do the mortar replacement but come on down the steps let's see what we have oh of note here if you can see the the giant limestone slabs that go across there's three of them but that basically holds the weight of the foundation these are amazing stones here [Music] if you look it's a brick arch it's beautifully done and it's in really good shape a few places may need a patchwork a little but i noticed right away we have these iron hooks and i suspect these were used to hang meats over the winter up in the top of the arch at the end you can see there's a few bricks that are missing and that would have been part of a ventilation setup so i have to think about the ventilation the cold air coming in and the hot air going out over in the corner here if you look closely you can see the stone that is actually you know bedrock stone that's in the ground so they just integrated that into the wall and down on the floor it is a dirt floor which is really good for a cold seller so we're not going to put anything on top of the floor all i'm going to do is is start by cleaning out here and i think i'm going to build shelves on both sides but the shelves i think that we are going to build we want them to be away from the wall a little bit and not have a back to the shelf i think the the ventilation and air movement is really important and a cold seller so a lot of work to do but just wanted to show you the beginning of this and the very first part of the project is going to be donnie's project alone that that seems like there's too many spiders in that for me so once he has the spiders out here i'll start helping him so in the business of cold seller different produce of the winter needs different uh temperatures and humidity so we're really fortunate on the farm that we actually have two cold sellers so let's go out to the barn and look at the cold cellar there our barn is a typical pennsylvania bank barn as you can see there's a bank that slopes up to the barn and believe it or not the cold seller is under that bank now follow me and i'll show you how to get to it it's kind of cool we didn't know about this room at first until a friend of dony's um used to play on this farm and said something about a secret room and we're like what secret room and then we said something to the previous owner and he showed us this you saw how excited it was about one root seller imagine two now there's the entrance to the root seller in here and does it look spooky it doesn't look spooky to me but there are spider webs everywhere so i still haven't walked down in that as soon as tony clears all the spider webs i'm anxious to walk in there and get a better view but for now he takes over sneak peek of the bar no animals yet not yet hopefully next year next spring yeah okay we're going to take a walk down into the barn root cellars you can see the door is off have some broken hinges to deal with and here are some of the spider webs that brenda was mentioning so we're just going to push them aside and head down see what we can see i did put a light down here to see what we have first thing we notice that this root cellar is probably three times the size of the root cellar that's in the farmhouse and this one is not a brick arch but it is stones limestone arch the whole way does need a little repair work if you look at some of the missing mortar there we're going to have to get that cleaned up now if you look down on the floor just as in the farmhouse it is a dirt floor which is great keep the humidity high and we should be able to keep make this one our coldest root cellar where we keep our root vegetables potatoes and some of our fruit in here that needs to be cold and then in the house root cellar we'll put some of the vegetables that need to be stored at 10 degrees 15 degrees warmer than this root cellar so i'm going to start at the root cellar in the house and then we'll start with this project so looking forward to uh to tearing into it well thank you for joining us in the beginning of our root cellar project i am very excited about this project so we're going to call this video root cellar part one so stay tuned for root cellar part two and that one will be without spiders see you next time you

Channel: Waardenburg Family Farm

Views: 63,470

Keywords: root cellar, cold cellar, Don & Brenda, Waardenburg Family Farm, farmhouse, 1840 house, homestead, farm, food storage, renovation, food preservation, limestone basement, old farmhouse basement, cold storage, homesteader, limestone cellar

Id: gGkAbMuT4to

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021