The old and the new. The cellars of old houses were little more than a black hole in the ground; to-day cellars are dry, light, clean 
and useful. A boys’ play-room occupies one end of the cellar in the modern house above 
Making the Most of the Cellar 
SOME OF THE PITFALLS TO AVOID WHEN PLANNING THE DWELLING’S FOUNDATION—PRACTI¬ 
CAL HINTS ON THE WAY CELLARS SHOULD BE WALLED, PAVED AND KEPT LIGHT AND DRY 
by Gardner Teall 
N O labyrinth of ingenious confusions, no maze of perilous 
passages ever quite equaled the inconveniences of a 
poorly planned cellar or one that has not been planned at all. 
In warm countries the cellar has been wont to be regarded merely 
as a necessary hole in the ground; in cold countries as a hiding 
place for the Leviathan-like furnace heating-plant, whose myriad 
of bewildering pipes overhead continually conspire to brain the 
unwary explorer of the cellar’s depths, who, groping hither and 
thither in a half light more useless than Stygian darkness, could 
have no hope of emerging whole in body and in temper, unbe¬ 
smirched and unbumped. 
The cellar of to-day is quite another matter, roomy, well 
lighted, heated, ventilated, and fitted with some indication, at 
least, of those respectable attributes a cellar should long ago have 
taken unto itself. 
Let the man who contemplates building a house free himself 
from a common impression that a cellar is an unavoidable evil, 
and realize, instead, that it is a very necessary good. His first con¬ 
sideration will be the fact that one may not always choose the 
precise site on a lot that would be the best suited to building 
conditions, since necessity quite as often as choice dictates the 
exact location for the house. 
But let it be borne in mind that the question of drainage is 
much simplified if the house can be built on high ground, and also 
that water passes through a gravel-and-sand soil much more 
•quickly than through clay soils, an important thing to remember 
because every cellar should be absolutely water-tight in its con¬ 
struction. 
Apropos the matter of soil the prospective house owner will 
not regret it if he has specified in the excavation contract that 
at least twelve inches of the top soil be removed and piled by 
itself as an after dressing when the lot comes to be graded. 
It is generally agreed that the excavation for a cellar should 
be about two feet wider on all sides than the cellar itself. A 
tile drain with open joints will offset the chance of dampness. 
This drain should be run along the outside of the walls, at least 
six inches below the cellar bottom, and it should be connected 
with some waste pipe that leads away from the house. The 
trench should then be filled in with broken stone to a depth of 
fully eighteen inches. 
The old-fashioned pole drain, made by laying poles of wood 
lengthwise in the surrounding trenches, should long ago have 
been superseded by modern methods, inasmuch as these poles 
soon rotted, defeating their purpose. The same objection may 
be advanced against the box-drain. 
Because a rock or clay soil holds the water, more or less, 
cellars dug in such soils must be made especially water-tight. 
In such a soil a four-inch concrete floor should be laid on an eight- 
or ten-inch foundation of broken stone. This serves to keep 
the damp from rising into the cellar. 
With a sandy or gravel soil the concrete may be laid on an 
inch foundation of Portland cement. 
Portland cement is considered about the most effective coat¬ 
ing for the exterior walls of the cellar also, but carelessness on 
the part of the workmen who have this part of the building in 
hand often leads to negating many of its virtues. 
As an extra precaution where cellar walls are laid in clay or 
rock soils, several coatings of boiling hot asphalt should be 
applied outside the walls and over the concrete bottom, which 
may then receive another layer of concrete. 
As for the walls themselves, concrete is superseding, to a very 
great extent, natural stone and brick. Brick, all the way 
through, should never be used for the cellar walls except in very 
dry countries. Limestone is probably more nearly impervious 
for walls than any other native material, but when using it a 
mason who knows his business will take good care that no single 
stone runs through the depth of the wall. If it did it would 
serve a sort of “frost-conduit,” in winter weather. 
Just here it is well to give a warning against the practice 
of permitting rubbish to accumulate between cellar walls and 
surrounding earth during the course of the house construction. 
If this matter is overlooked it is more than probable that storm 
water will accumulate in this “sponge” and effect permanent 
dampness. 
Cellar dampness causes mold, decay, and rust, and produces an 
environment no more fit for a human being to step into than that 
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