Should my house have a cellar

[keatsie]

How do you know if your house should have had a cellar?

It sounds daft but we dont seem to have a cellar opening but i would have expcted a cellar on a house of this size and age. Are thier any telltale signs we can look out for, for a hidden or infilled cellar? Anything which might give clue would be appreciated.

Cheers

 

[Penners]

How do you know if your house should have had a cellar?

It sounds daft but we dont seem to have a cellar opening but i would have expcted a cellar on a house of this size and age. Are thier any telltale signs we can look out for, for a hidden or infilled cellar? Anything which might give clue would be appreciated.

Cheers

I'm afraid this is going to be pretty much an unanswerable question, particularly with no indication of the age, type or location of the house. Even with that information, it's guesswork. You'd be better looking into local parish, county and/or planning records.

 

[MatthewC]

My house was the back half of a rectangular school building which was converted into a pair of semis. In the stone wall near my front door there is a vertical joint in the stone (where the gaps between stones are all in line vertically). It's visible on the left in the photo of the bay window half way down this page of my blog http://houseintheenchantedforest.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/were-moving-in.html. This indicates to me that it is where there was a way down to a cellar, and there were probably steps as the top of the vertical joint is a few feet lower than the top of the door. There is only the one vertical joint as the other half of the doorway was rebuilt when they added a window to the house in the conversion.

When doing other work we found first the old chimney and then the bricked up fireplace which was in the back of the schoolroom. However, there were no signs of a cellar under the suspended floor - too well filled in.

 

[malcolm]

Our house (a former pub) was described as having 'cellarage' in 1846. The most obvious place for me to look is an odd arched alcove under the stairs which looks a bit like a fireplace. In 1846 this would have been a recently built external wall, and it doesn't seem likely that someone would go to the effort of making an alcove there later just for the effect. I don't know whether damp could give some indication as the walls of my stairwell are unusually damp, or it could just be because the ground level is high under the stairs. Might find a cellar when I try to fix the damp.

A look at Google images for cellar entrance suggests a lot of cellars were accessed from outside the house with the top of a brick arched opening just above the original ground level. A filled in arch in an outside wall (or former outside wall) might be a good clue.

 

[Annadee]

How do you know if your house should have had a cellar?

It sounds daft but we dont seem to have a cellar opening but i would have expcted a cellar on a house of this size and age. Are thier any telltale signs we can look out for, for a hidden or infilled cellar? Anything which might give clue would be appreciated.

Cheers

Hi Keatsie,
Did you ever find a cellar and opening? We’re in this situation and I came across your post . I’d be intrigued to hear.

 

[Lacan07]

My neighbour has what appears to be the top of a window arch peeping out from the ground in our shared back yard. This is a former hop farm. The main part of the building / farm behind has a full blown cellar so we were curious as to what might be under his living room.