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Our Cellar Door

What does one do at Panat when the weather is hot? Seek refuge in the wine cellar, of course.  In 2006 Orest came up with an awesome idea: we should make a cellar door with some leftover thick chestnut boards that Élie Foulquier, our late carpenter, had prepared for flooring decades ago.

The door would separate the outer, warmer part of our cellar from the inner, very cool part where we store our wine. We had no trouble envisaging how the door should be built, but we knew it would be impossible to lift the door into place and slide the long iron pentures onto the iron gonds that we would insert into the stones at each side of the door. The only solution was to build the door in situ. And that is exactly what we did.

We very much wanted the door to resemble the old doors found in barns and cellars. Save for an electric drill/screwdriver and an electric saw, we have a rather limited collection of tools at Panat; but we were sure they would suffice, if we approached each step more or less as peasants had done in past centuries.  For example, we did not use a keyhole saw adjust to the little stone capital to the left of the door: instead, we rasped and we sanded by hand. And we made paper patterns and verified measurements repeatedly before sawing, because we knew from the outset that we did not have a single board to spare. Those boards are 27 mm. thick and have never been planed: in other words, nothing remotely like them can be purchased in the French equivalent of Home Depot.

 First we constructed a pair of heavy frames onto which the chestnut planks would be screwed. In this first picture, Orest is placing the left-hand frame into the arch leading to the far-cellar. On the table lie the tongue-and-groove chestnut floorboards, to be placed one by one on the frame.

This picture shows the same frame, but by this point we had tacked on two horizontal chestnut boards, and onto them we temporarily attached the pentures. Until that moment, everything had to be held in place with wedges and boards such as the one lying under the door. Once the pentures were temporarily in place, work was easier.

That lower penture looks crooked, but it's mainly an optical illusion: the floor is not level; and in addition the chestnut boards are "random-width," that is, the two tongued-and-grooved edges are not parallel. When working with that type of board, one has to be very careful to alternate wide and narrow ends: otherwise everything goes askew and the panel looks as if it is leaning to one side.

Here is the finished door. We built the entire left side first, starting at the bottom. We added boards one at a time, first adjusting the left side roughly to fit the irregular contour of the arch, and then pounding it onto the tongue or groove the previous piece. Especially challenging was cutting that little piece from the door to fit the contours of an old stone capital, a challenge made even greater by the fact that at this point the doors could not be fully closed. Idem for matching the shape of the protrusion opposite it, on the right side.

We cautiously left extra wood at the center edge of the door and didn't cut that center edge until the very end. In other words, for most of the project, the two halves of the door could not close. When both halves were complete, we drew a vertical line on each half, at the place where we hoped they would meet. Orest took a deep breath and began sawing vertically from top to bottom. What a relief to see that the doors come together very well, with just enough space for expansion and contraction. To close the gap and keep the doors in place, as a final touch we added the vertical board that is used in the region for just that purpose. (We were very pleased that it was given to us by Michel Foulquier, Élie Foulquier's son.)

At the end of the project, there were a few dozen 3-6" pieces of chestnut board, and one cracked piece about 2 feet long that we hoped we wouldn't have to use ― testimony to how wise we had been to measure and re-measure those precious boards before cutting them.