Our Cold Cellar & Missing Dumb Waiter

One of the joys of owning an older home is all the history that can be learned along the way. For example, a cold cellar. Now, I had heard of a "root" cellar, or in the case of our home, a "fruit" cellar. However, I had not heard of a cold cellar. When interviewing Mr. Schmidt, he had inquired if the original cold cellar was still in the house. At the time, we had no clue what he was talking about. However, using the description he provided us, we did a little bit of searching and discovered the spot where the original cold cellar had been located.

Prior to the invention of the ice box and before electricity was installed, some homes featured a separate cold cellar - a box located in the basement that could hold perishable items. Some of these cold cellars incorporated a dumb waiter to make it easier to raise and lower the food. We even learned that some of these dumb waiters carried the food all the way from the cold cellar in the basement up into the kitchen or pantry. Based on a review of our flooring above the cold cellar, the original dumb waiter most likely only raised and lowered the food within the basement itself.

This architectural drawing was found in a construction manual from the 1800's. Based on the plan above, you can see why I think that this is the one that closely resembles what we have discovered while excavating our own cold cellar (as if we did not do enough hole digging and excavating between the outhouse and well!). I am hoping that we can use this plan to reconstruct a simple dumb waiter and start using the cold cellar. I think it will be a neat experiment, especially working with the kids to track the temperature every day. Because I do the bulk of my shopping once a month, I have to freeze a lot of things that are normally refrigerated, such as butter, hard cheese, and cream cheese. If this system truly works like an electric refrigerator and is able to maintain a safe temperature range, I will be able to stock up without having to rely on the freezer.

Because we had to use a sledge hammer to break through the concrete "repair", we do not have the smooth sides all around the top. I am hoping that this is something that Dave will be able to fix. As part of our restoration process, we are hoping to build a lid, since the previous owners put the door to the this area of the basement to the left of the cellar. It definitely makes it a challenge to do laundry or obtain food from the pantry.

Based on my research of dumb waiters, they consisted of a wooden box slightly smaller than the cold cellar, with anywhere from two (2) to four (4) shelves and a pair of screened or mesh doors, similar to what you can see on the old pie safes. This allowed the cool air to circulate around and through the storage box itself, ensuring the food stayed cold. Since our cold cellar is only two (2) feet deep, I am hoping to have three (3) shelves. This makes the shelf spacing comparable to what we currently have in our refrigerator. I am also hoping to use tin for the doors, so that I can punch my own design.

While we were able to fairly easily identify where the original cold cellar was located, we had no idea what we would find. I mean, we did not know how the cellar had been filled prior to being cemented over. I thought that it might have been filled with sand and debris, similar to the outhouse and well. We initially tried drilling a few exploratory holes using a drill with a concrete bit. No matter how far down we drilled, all we saw was concrete dust several inches thick. We began to fear that they had used concrete to fill the entire opening. What a nightmare that would have been! Dave began tapping the entire surface area and discovered a hollow sounding spot. We began to pound away in that area until we broke through the concrete. Fortunately, the concrete itself was not that thick. It turned out that when they took down one wall of the rain cistern to open up that portion of the basement, they used the rocks and concrete debris to fill the space. Once we were able to remove the concrete top layer, it was just a matter of lifting out all the large rocks and jagged concrete pieces.

The really super fine concrete debris we are thinking about using in the driveway, similar to gravel. The larger rocks we would like to use to build a permanent fire pit.

Overall, I think that this was another fun and exciting discovery and restoration project for us. Once we have the dumb waiter rebuilt and finished, I will be sure to update with photos of the finished cold cellar, completely stocked!

Our Wonderful Fruit Cellar Pantry

When our house was originally built in 1920, the basement had a section built out with masonry to be the home's fruit cellar. Today we use the original fruit cellar as our pantry. It is a wonderful and charming space featuring some of the field stone foundation on two sides and the NATCO hollow tile brick on two sides. Some of the wood shelves appear to be original, but are warping quite badly and will need to be upgraded at some point. In the meantime, we have been adding shelving gradually to expand our usable space. As promised, here are some photos for everyone to see.

When you first open the door to the pantry, you see my baker's rack, full of dried beans, canning and pickling seasonings, soup stock flavorings and commercially canned produce and soups. The upper wooden shelves we believe to be original to the house and hold our dry soup mixes (in the white box) and some more canned foods - mostly tomato products and canned meats.

Panning to the right, we added one of those nine-box storage shelves. Originally it was in the boys' room and held the cardboard organizing boxes. Those boxes did not last long and were destroyed before we even moved into the house. It was shuffled around to various rooms until we finally moved it into the pantry. This cubicle storage unit primarily hold baking supplies, such as brown sugar, cornbread boxes, bread crumbs, syrups, rice, powdered milk and instant potatoes. The top also hold some additional baking supplies as well as goodies for the baby.

This is a picture of the inside corner of the pantry space. We installed one of those metal, five-shelved units that you can pick up for about $20.00 at Wal-mart. For the most part, this shelving unit hold all the vegetables that we canned, dill pickles, spaghetti sauce and tomato soup. We have found that these shelves provide a good amount of storage at a reasonable cost and can be gradually added.
  

 This section of the pantry is where we store our commercially packaged condiments and the three types of flours that I like to stock. We are investigating a better, long-term storage option for the flours, but for now, we are keeping them in their original packaging.

 

The next section of shelving holds our paper products, juice, sugar, chips and water. The shelving space here is a bit awkward. Eventually, we hope to add more of the shelving units to better utilize the space, but still maintain the uppermost original shelf.

Swinging around and we have two more of those wonderful shelves. These are full of home canned goods. The first one holds mostly fruits, in the form of jams, butters and syrups. The second shelf is a mixture of both fruits and vegetables. This is where the overflow of pickles, spaghetti sauce, tomato soup and more is stored.

Finally, we are back around and to the doorway again. We keep crates at the bottom to hold our onions and potatoes and use the window ledge to hold health and beauty products.

So this is our little pantry. I hope you enjoyed the pictures and that it has given you some ideas for your home.

Canning Season Is Over

Canning season has come to an end for 2012 with the processing of the pumpkins. While in the midst of it all, it seemed like I was canning every day. Now that we are done, I was surprised at how little I was able to get done out of our garden. I am thankful for the Back to Eden approach and am looking forward to doing it again next year, but I was really surprised by the total overall. I had such high expectations for our first gardening experience! I am trying to keep in mind that this year we were suffering from a horrible drought and some of our plants just didn't seem to produce, such as the Brussels sprouts.

I have updated the food preservation page to include the totals of everything preserved for 2012. Now that the season is over, I was able to put it into alphabetical order and sort it by size, so it is a little easier to read. It will be interesting to see how 2013 will do compared to 2012 now that we have a better grasp of the garden and canning. I also have to remind myself that this was only my second year of canning, too!

In all, we put away 8.5 gallons (freezer bags) in the big freezer and 93 half-pints, 84 pints, and 187 quarts in the pantry. We are still in the process of organizing our pantry, adding additional shelving and just getting it organized overall. Once we finish getting it cleaned up and organized for winter, I will post some pictures to share with everyone.

We are already in the process of looking ahead to 2013 and are considering a few new things. We are researching greenhouses and are actually thinking of replacing our shed with an assemble-yourself greenhouse. This should help with seed starting come February. I also watched a phenomenal video on youtube that taught how to start seeds to ensure proper growth. I am really excited to try out some of their ideas. We are looking at expanding the garden into the flower gardens around the house by planting the culinary herbs, herbal tea plants and medicinal plants close to the house. This year, we are ordering our heirloom seeds from a provider that we recently heard about, www.mypatriotsupply.com. With the new herbs and medicinal plants, I had to order a book so that I could learn how to use them! Finally, I also ordered a book on owning a root cellar. We used to have a root cellar in our basement that someone cemented over. Hopefully this book will give us some ideas on how to either restore or build a new root cellar for more storage options.

Now that summer is over, we are back to working on various projects around the house. Thus far, we have reorganized the laundry room. All year long, the washer and dryer have been driving me crazy by "walking" around! I was also having trouble adjusting to having the washer on the right and the dryer on the left as I lived with it in a reverse formation for the past eight years. We initially tried balancing the appliances using cardboard, but they walked right off that too! It was getting really frustrating and annoying, especially since we have a metal capped sewer pipe of some sorts right in that area - and the washer seemed to be constantly hitting it, making even more noise. We finally solved all the problems by switching the two appliances and getting everything adjusted. I am so happy! (Isn't it amazing how the simplest things can put a smile on our face?). Our last improvement to the laundry areas was the addition of a shelving unit like we are using in the pantry. This gives me a great place to store laundry supplies and other project odds and ends.

We also hung the original pantry door back up. The door was found lying on the floor against the outer pantry wall. Unfortunately, it was buried behind so much clutter that we could barely get to it. As part of our basement clean up project, we got that area all cleaned up and decided to hang the door. We weren't really sure why it was taken off to begin with, but suspected it had something to do with the hinges, since they were missing. To our disgust, we discovered that the door had been removed because the piping to the furnace was hung too low, causing the door to only be opened a few inches. Thankfully, this was an easy fix - we simply had to move a supporting block of wood and hang a few inches higher the pipe supports. Now the door can swing open freely. The door needs some work and we are missing some of the hardware, but it still is a neat thing to see, especially since most of the original doors were removed prior to us owning the house.

I'm sure that we will be working on a lot more projects in the house over the winter months - such as working on the wood floors! Unfortunately, we need to use our heat guns to do that project and, really, who wants to use a heat gun in the middle of summer!

Next time, I'll try to have more pictures. Til then, God bless!