Pictures of completed root cellar!

The root cellar is finished! Can I get a “hell yeah”?

Click to embiggen:

Yep, that’s water on the floor, from the spring rains. It always oozes in around the corners – the shelves are on bricks to keep the wood away from the moisture. (Update 2011: I had to take the dark red paneling off because it wicked moisture up from the floor and got moldy.)

(I ran out of 2x4s…but there’s room to add a third shelf on the top. These are 7′ long and the uprights are 64″ tall…just barely shorter than me.) The white circle in the lower left is the cap on the end of the cold air vent pipe.

This is the ventilation system. The window lifted out of its frame easily, and I replaced it with a “sandwich” of plywood and rigid foam. Two pipes pass through it: a short one at ceiling height to let out warm air, and a long one down the wall and along the ground under the shelves to let in cold air. They open at opposite corners of the room to increase airflow. (That’s why the shelves are so open, too.) The pipes have caps for the ends to keep it from getting *too* cold in there. Or to keep warm air out in the spring/summer. Update 2011: I eventually just took this system down and opened/closed the window as needed.  The pipe vent system didn’t change the temperature fast enough.

There’s also a video with a 360 degree view. It looks very pink; the only fluorescent lights I had were grow-lights, which makes the colors down there very funky.