The cellar under a dwelling house has many advocates. It is a convenient,
cool place, and nineteen times out of twenty is a damp, dark, musty,
foul-smelling place. It cannot well be otherwise and be a cellar. It is a
store-room for all sorts of vegetables; odds and ends of most everything
are laid away in that dark retreat. It is the favorite resort of spiders,
toads and other creeping things; it is the unrelenting enemy (?) of the
family physician, the breeding-place of malaria, which unceasingly sends
its poisonous vapors into every part of the dwelling above it. It would
be suicide for one to make it their sleeping room.
But if you insist upon having a cellar under your house, and will not
put it under the corn-crib or carriage-house, see that it is properly
constructed. This is more important than most of the other parts of the
house, for upon it in a great measure depends the health of your entire
family.
The floor of the cellar should be hard and dry, with no woodwork in
its construction. To obtain this result, cover the floor about three
inches deep with coarse gravel, or broken stone, well pounded to a level
surface. Fill this with a thin mortar, composed of one part hydraulic
cement and two parts sharp sand, smoothing it off with a trowel or
plasterer’s level. When we mention sharp sand, we mean coarse, clean sand.
Build a flue, say 8 × 12 inches (with an opening next to the floor of the
cellar fully that size), from the bottom of cellar foundation alongside
of and extending to top of kitchen chimney, the heat of which will create
a constant, upward current of air from the cellar. On the opposite side
of cellar from this ventilating flue make an air inlet near the ceiling
for the purpose of supplying fresh air to the cellar. This will keep
the cellar dry and the atmosphere healthy. Put a wire netting over the
opening to prevent the entrance of rats and mice. If from the nature of
the location, or other causes, a cellar is damp, dig a trench all around
a little below and outside of the foundation wall; this trench should be
covered with flat stones and earth filled in a little above the surface
line, so that surface water will flow from, and not settle next to, the
foundation walls. When the cellar is completed whitewash the walls and
ceiling.