Finally building my wine cellar: advice requested

Just a quick thought :
Concerning the door, you will probably want a heavy insulated "outside" door. If so, put a pull bar on the door as well as a handle. I found a nice brass one at a junk shop for $10. It saves a lot of stress on the door knob. Todays hardware isn't as strong as it used to be.

Hope people can continue to contribute their knowledge and experience...

Got the room all nicely framed out and insulated pretty much according to plan here, and a good solid external door. Electricity wired up, getting a sensor light put in. All feels good. I'd planned on painting the two Greenboard (interior) walls and nobody had recommended not doing so, so I put up a coat of primer over the weekend and was shocked at the smell. I've had to have doors open to the outside and been running a fan and am concerned at how long the aromas will hang around and when it woill be safe to bring the wine in to such a room. (This was lowish VOC primer, don't know if it necessarily makes a difference to the smell.)

How did other people who built similar cellars cope with this? By not painting and living with ugly drywall? By keeping paint coats to a minimum and not bringing in the wine until the aroma had disappeared? Or by using other coatings/coverings and if so, what - especially on a tight budget!

Many thanks and happy new year to all

Tony

I solved the new construction odor problem by accident. Three bottles of Chardonnay slipped out of a bin and had broken on the floor. I discovered this a few days later. All the wine had evaporated and with it went any non-cellar odors.

"Greenboard"

Tony, is greenboard the heavy stuff they use for bathrooms, etc. to attach tile to?

Was your primer water or oil based?

If water, you can just continue with a second coat of water based primer and two coats of water based paint. I'm assuming, though, that the primer was oil based from the description of the smell you describe.

Don't paint water based paint over the oil based primer, if that's what you have. It will make the sitch worse in a number of ways.

If it is oil based primer, consider putting a light coat of mud on the greenboard, and putting up 12 by 12 tile. If you have two sheets of 4 by 8 greenboard, you would need 64 tiles, and you can buy seconds for around a buck apiece, maybe less. Maybe a tile cutter for a few hours from a rental place, and a little mortar, ten pounds. You should be able to tile for around a hundred bucks.

I would scratch the dickens out of the paint so as much of the green board is showing as possible. You can get a wire brush that will attach to a drill that will make the job easier. Also, go with the thickest base coat that the tile supply place will recommend.

Be sure you get clay based finished tile -- the fired surface -- you need to seal off the smell of the paint completely and you don't want any migration through the tile. You might want to add "milk" to the mortar to help it stick better, and make the seams as tight as possible, tile to tile.

There are a couple of types of coatings you could add to the tile once it is up and dried -- I'll ask our tile guy for a suggestion of brands, etc.

Regards, Bob

Since I was already using my basement for wine storage before finishing the space, I built and painted around the wine which I had moved back into boxes. The paint smell subsides in a few days and the wine showed no impact to having been subjected to fumes.

Here's an interesting link for an item that records temperatures. The device is then plugged into a USB port to track temperature variations.
HOBO Temperature Logger Kit

You should be watching for two things:about 55F temperature & Normal humidity. Enjoy your investment, and let Bacchus be with you! [/img][/url]

How did other people who built similar cellars cope with this? By not painting and living with ugly drywall? By keeping paint coats to a minimum and not bringing in the wine until the aroma had disappeared? Or by using other coatings/coverings and if so, what - especially on a tight budget!

I totally left my cellar interior unfinished. Racks or stacks of OWCs block most of the walls, and I was going for utilitarian (David and Betsy painted outside - I mean ones visible from basement- walls in a psychedelia meets abstract expressionist style, using up several quarts of paints we had leftover from interiror walls).

Is it primer latex/water or oil-based (I assume not alcohol based, as smells tend to dissipate quickly)? In any case if you get temps into suggested range and ventilate, it will dry and smells will go away. I assume in NY winter humidity shouldn't be too high to dry.

Happy New Year to you and your family!

Thanks everyone and happy new year to all of you. And thanks for putting my mind at rest. The paint is water based latex paint - I guess it was just the enclosed space that made it so stinky. I'll keep going with the air fan and opening the sliders when I can and trust it will subside. From what I see from all of you, a water-based paint should not be a long-term issue. If that's the case, I may just go one more coat and leave it at that, returning to the "utilitarian" point of view that Dale mentions and of which I initially boasted. It's so easy to set out saying it will costs nothing more than framing and sheetrock and go down that slippery path of ever more fancy decorations.

Tony

Assuming people are not bored silly of my admittedly endless questions: how many of you put up plastic vapor sheeting on your sheetrock before putting in the batt insulation? Is Dale the only one to put it up on the concrete walls, too? What exactly is the effect of the vapor barrier: to prevent moisture from escaping from the wine cellar (i.e. keeping humidity high) or to prevent it coming into the cool cellar from otehr, warmer rooms (i.e. keeping humidity levels low)?

Thanks again

Tony

The point of a vapor barrier is to keep the level of moisture on the "inside" from being affected quite so much by variations in the moisture level on the "outside".

So, to answer your question, yes.

I'll leave it up to you to decide which side is inside.

FWIW - I've been frequenting a home winemakers website recently and they have an entire forum on wine cellar construction. Here's a link: Wine Cellar Construction, Photos & Wine Storage

Hey everyone

The cellar is still a work in progress; been watching the temps through the winter before doing final paint on sheetrock. I've also got Gold's book to keep me company and in line. A "green" store suggested to me using clay as a final cover material; appears to have massive insulation properties (thermal and acoustic) and can apparently hold 300 times its weight in water, and would surely look nice. Should also be low/no odor, which was a problem with the primer. Anyone got any comments either way?

I was pointed to the http://www.americanclay.com web site, by the way. No mention of clay in Gold's book.

Tony