Basement or cellar?
- Sylvia Cooley
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
A cellar is what I grew up with. My childhood home had an old oak roll-top desk in the cellar where the neighborhood kids could gather for a club. There was also a root cellar- a room with a dirt floor where my Mom stored canned goods on a shelf and potatoes, things like that. It has a good smell. The earth, coolness, dark. There was one finished room that my Dad had created for his photography business (in his early days) and my oldest sister had painted a variety of cool colors using tape to form triangles and other geometric shapes with nice clean lines.
I tend to think of cellars as something from the 1950s and basements from the 1980s. Or maybe there were cellars in Vermont and basements in Massachusetts.
Our new basement at the Ridge Road house is quite the contrast from the old house. It's the only time I don't mind a difference from the original house. It is huge, concrete, and has a heated floor. Instead of glimpsing daylight through openings in the stone foundation, you get light through small basement windows. Most importantly, it is a sturdy base for the house and creates lots of extra space. It is one of the ways that I hope to lure my Massachusetts family/kids to come up. I have promised a ping pong table down there. I imagine starting a model train project that can be ongoing and growing- set up on plywood tables on top of sawhorses.
The walls will be insulated with white rigid foam boards.
The utility room will be self-contained with locked doors. You can enter it via the bulkhead on the north side of the house.
There will be a spare room just to the right as you come down to the base of the stairs, that will have sheetrock, a large closet, a window. I call it the exercise room but it can be a space for an overflow of guests.
Basements are not beautiful but I am excited about our new one. So far, no water rising up (like in one of our houses requiring a sump pump), nice and dry. So far no cracks like our current one and not yet filled with STUFF. I have time now to whittle down our stored-debris-of-living (stuff in boxes) before we move to Vermont, so hopefully this basement will stay more open. Our laundry room is on the first floor, near our bedroom, not down here. So that is one less thing in the basement.
I so enjoy reading your childhood reminiscences that your house building is bringing to the forefront of your mind!
Our house that I grew up in, in Nelson had a finished basement, where my sister and I had our bedrooms, our Dad, his workshop and our Mom, the laundry room! Inside the cement front stairs, was a cold room where the root vegetables were kept. This was such a different place, in my mind than our cozy bedrooms, the ordinariness of the laundry room or the creative space of the workshop-it was a ‘hold your breathe, almost squeeze your eyes shut, run quickly and grab whatever vegetables were on the menu for dinner’ place, before whatever that day’s ‘monster …
Beautiful, spectacular views!
Love the roll top!