Home improvements, slowly taking place

The first home improvement project that we decided to tackle is the wine cellar. When we moved in, the room looked like this:



It is a small space off of the family room. The lower walls are granite; they stick up into the house. There aren't any upper walls, it's just open to the crawl space and plumbing, wiring and foundation. The two wooden wine racks block the views of most of the infrastructure, but not all. The plan is to pull those out and replace them with real walls and our own wine racks that we brought with us from Virginia. Until we have time to do demolition, though, we're using the room as our liquor cabinet:



(update)

We started demolition this weekend by tearing down the old wooden wine boxes. Then we framed for new upper walls. It was actually more difficult than I expected because there is no level surface upon which to rest the wall framing. The hillside just comes into the back of the lower wall, so it's all loose gravel and stone. Chris affixed the framing to the ceiling and then dug out the gravel to create a trench in which to place the framing. The back wall isn't going to support anything, so it doesn't have to be rock-solid, thank goodness.



Next on the list is sheeting the walls and then painting. After that, Chris is going to build support columns to hold up the wine racks and we'll tile the base where the wine racks will sit.