Dry room

The conditions in our basement pretty much follow the seasons — cold in the winter, damp in the summer. This is to be expected given that it’s a rubble-stone foundation in a 128-year-old house. Still, we store stuff down there so we run a dehumidifier. When the weather is humid or damp, that dehumidifier is easily one-third of our electric bill.

As all of you know, I am working on digitizing family-history photographs. I’ve been thinking about what to do with the originals. We don’t routinely air-condition the house during the summer, so storing them in the living space is not ideal. But they need to leave our dining room in time for Thanksgiving.

So that got me thinking: what if I built a modern vapor-barriered storage closet in the basement, and used our existing dehumidifier to keep it drier than I’m willing to run it now? That would cut our summer power usage dramatically and give me an excellent place for those photos — and all the other moisture-sensitive stuff we’d like to store.

So that’s what I am doing. Today I got as far as the perimeter plate, floor sleepers, and floor vapor barrier. The hardest part so far has been emptying out this corner of the basement of the other stuff we’ve accumulated. The white-painted stud walls already existed, a big part of why I chose this corner.