Salvaging the Root Cellar III

Once the contractors departed I jumped in and replaced the original floor of the shed.  The building had settled enough that I wound up shimming the joists at the new wall about an inch prior to laying the new 3/4″ CDX flooring.  Once that was done I retrieved some of my stash of rigid foam insulation from the barn fourth floor and cut and placed three inches of foil faced polyisocyanurate rigid insulation in between the joists from below, in essence turning the root cellar into a super-insulated chamber.

The winter set in about then and I abandoned the project for eight months while we coped with winter and the all-consuming Studley projects.

Finally on my return from the MJD tool auction I turned my attentions to finishing this project.  This included first clearing the path across the creek to the entrance of the root cellar and the construction of a temporary walkway bridge to hold sway until I build the permanent arched bridge there this fall or next spring.

The next step was to excavate the rubble on the entrance path to the cellar door in order to find a place to put the huge stones left in place by the concrete contractors who managed to leave the collapse rubble in place.

One special treat was removing a several hundred pound mass of poured concrete slag that was simply left in place.  The wrong place.

The moving of all these hunks of stone and concrete was achieved through the judicious use of horsepower in the form of my truck, placed across the creek directly opposite the cellar door, with the stones lashed to the tow hooks on the bumper with rope.  Gently I pulled the stones out, then placed them with iron pipes and other leveraging tools.

Once that was done and the space was cleared enough to actually work I undertook the finishing of the masonry so that the doorway could be rebuilt, along with some repointing of the stonework inside.

The last big construction task was to fabricate a bear-proof door for the cellar, which I did with two layers of pressure treated 2x construction lumber with the two lamina assembled cross grained with a box of decking screws.

The final steps were cleaning up, clearing out, and moving in the new gravel to level and smooth the floor in order to fit the door bottom and threshold.  And that is when I suffered the debilitating attack by the gravel laden wheelbarrow.

This is how I left it, the final details will have to wait another month.