On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 22:55:20 -0000, wrote:

In article D%GPb.97699$Rc4.597699@attbi_s54, Alan Sung wrote:
My plan is to build the wine cellar as a room with double walls:
...
Seems a bit overkill for a basement, but you may want to consider something
called stress skin panels or structural insulating panels for this
application. It basically looks like a giant ice cream sandwich where the
outside is typically OSB plywood and the inside is either polyurethane or
polyisocyanurate. There are variants where one side is OSB and the other
side is sheetrock or OSB on one side and nothing on the other side.

You can sheetrock over the OSB facing the interior of your wine cellar and
then you could hang shelves anywhere because you wouldn't need to find a
stud.

Sounds like a good idea, as long as all the weight of the wine racks
is supported by the floor. Sadly, this is not our situation. Our
house is less than 2 miles from the San Andreas fault, and is designed
for earthquake forces of 0.65g sideways. This means that the wine
racks have to be heavily anchored on the walls, and the walls have to
be strong enough to hold the wine (meaning pretty much 2x4
construction, anchored into the concrete foundation and masonry
walls). I think a single sheet of OSB won't cut it. And holding the
wine racks through several inches of OSB into masonry anchors sounds
difficult.

This naturally leaves the problem of where to find wine racks that can
hold the bottles through a medium-size quake. Here is an example of
one approach, which supposedly has already survived several minor
quakes (it was built as a reaction to the 1989 earthquake, if I
remember right):
http://www.mckusick.com/~mckusick/images/winecellar.jpg

Naturally, in a major quake, one would expect all the wine to be
gone. In that situation, being alive and having a structurally sound
house is all one can ask for.


This may sound like a wild idea but suppose you hung it off the
ceiling with a hinge connection? Like a rope swing, side sway
movement would easily be tolerated. Some thought as to how to
construct this for your structure will be a given.