Cave, but now properly

We wanted to use the cellar under the kitchen for storage of canned and bottled food stuff, and clean up the kitchen. The cellar is about 30 m², which is a quite useful space:

In cellar posts I have written down some experiences with our cellar, and how it was humid, and is now a lot better by removing the old plaster and installing a ventilator. But, it's still not good enough for food storage. Or in fact any storage. The humidity now is reasonable, but the walls and ceiling kept dropping dust and bits of old plaster, covering everything with a nasty dust layer. And, the floor was not a proper tiled floor, but a very old-fashioned compacted earth floor.

What to do. Engineer Jansen learned from Le Bricoleur (Christian von Klösterlein) that you better not simply tile a floor like that, or humidity will rise up in the walls and make things even worse. His solutions always are for ground level floors, and thus he digs in drains and applies external wall cladding to keep moisture out. As this is a cellar we cannot apply external cladding or drains, unless we dig a huge trench. 

We decided that the walls need plastering with the very breathing Kerakoll Muroseco plaster that we already used in the kitchen and cave room with great success: those walls are now properly dry, which is a huge improvement for the atmosphere in the house. A humid house you cannot heat in winter: every bit of warmth is sucked up by the wet walls, and gone. 

But what to do about the floor? Engineer Jansen thought it would be a good idea to build a floor with a ventilatable space underneath:

On top of those beams  ceramic tiles are put, then a layer of concrete, then tiles. And, a proper expansion joint all around the floor: a modern concrete slab in a classic building can be a danger to the house, even though the temperature in the cellar is pretty constant. 

As you can see in the picture above they left gaps between the end of the beams, and underneath the beams too. That was not what was requested, we wanted separate channels, so those gaps are filled with a blob of cement. 

And lo!

At both ends of the cellar there are plastic gutters:

The idea is that the extractor fan at the end of the cellar expels the air down into the second cellar, thus creating a gentle airflow over these grates, hopefully ventilating the floor below enough to not make damp rise up into the walls.

We ordered 8 metal Ikea racks 160x80 cm for storage. Stay tuned! Oh, just heard that it will take 4 weeks to get them delivered, due to the corona crisis. Always something.