We had this partly underground space that was called a cellar and honestly looked quite awful. There were a few problems with it. One was that the bottom part of the walls was just natural rock. That sound nice you say, but it was not. The rock in our village is a very soft limestone that let water through easily. It mostly looks like clay and is about as hard as dried clay. The biggest problem is that, when it rains, that it very seldom do, the water comes through it an there will be moist in the cellar. And, believe me; moist is not good for wine bottles, or rather for the corks. The other problem is that the rock gets soft when it gets wet and pieces of it falls down so after a while we had a pile of soft gravel in the corners of the cellar.
The other problem was that there was only a floor in a part of the cellar. The rest was just filled with gravel and old debris. The old lady next door who played in the cellar when she was little girl says it is a lower storage space under the cellar that was filled because it was regarded too dangerous. Our house is built on the site of the old castle and some of our walls are part of the castle. They say it has been a fortification on the site since the roman time and there are tunnels going under the site to the outside of the village. The tunnels should connect the castle on our site to the smaller mediaeval castle that is still there but used to be outside the mote. The lady says the opening in our cellar is an opening to those tunnels.
The walls in the cellar were also mended and patched many times through the years with all kinds of materials from cement to plaster. The problem with that is that not all materials stick to such surfaces so in the worst of cases we should have to pick the whole walls to get down to the original stone wall. We know from experience of the renovation of the attic that this means a lot of hard work.
To really top up the problems, the plaster cover of the old ceiling was coming down if we did not do anything about it. Now you say: “Why the ~do they bother to do anything with that space?” It is simple – we want to have a wine cellar as we live in one of the best wine areas in south of
Anyway, in the following articles I will tell you how we dealt with:
· The rock that let water through
· How we made the walls look good
· What we did with the floors
· And what we did with the ceiling and a few more things.
Look out for more contributions soon.
