I would suggest a used freezer (standup or chest) plus a temp controller. Works great and is the largest/cheapest good option in my opinion.
I need to clean up a nasty looking one that I have wound up with. It'll be a lot of work, but should work great. Guess I need to also read about temp controllers too!
Agreed. I got a very well kept upright on craigslist for $75. $50 on a temp controller and its perfect. Holds about 100 bombers and 50 12oz'ers.
Yup, contracting is much harder than expanding. I had the beer fridge for about 3 years before I really started packing it. Once I started trading and buying more than just drinking beers it got out of control.
For a cellar you can easily go with an analog ($40-50ish) temp controller. It takes a little adjusting to get the temp just right, but once you set it, you don't need to change it for a cellar. For homebrewing fermenting freezers it's worth it to go digital ($70-90ish), because you want to be able to change the temperature often and need it to be right on as soon as it is set.
This might seem like a stupid question, but why do so few (if any?) Texas houses have basements? I don't recall seeing one in the more than 13 years I've lived here. Edit: Make that south central Texas houses - they're the ones I have most experience of.
Only thing I could think of is that the ground is so dry, and hard that building the houses would be much more expensive to break through the ground. I do service work and can honestly say I've never seen a house in Texas with a basement.
I know one of the biggest reasons for that is that if you dig down two feet in most areas in Texas you'll either hit limestone or hard clay. Limestone will need to pretty much be dynamited. Clay isn't too bad but the problem is when it rains enough it'll become loose and move around enough that when it hardens again it can affect the structural ingerity of the basement. Rain also presents a problem with limestone as it is porous and will move a ton if water around the basement so you'll have to make sure the basement is super-super sealed against water. All this info is backed by my pool boy buddy.
I used to work at a building in downtown Austin with a parking garage that went underground 4 stories. I don't think water table is an issue. They had a LOT of leaks down there when it rained hard though, lol. My spot was on B4 and I always expected my truck to be floating if their pumps gave out. I've also been in a house in West Lake ($$$$) that had a basement with a huge wine cellar. Whole Foods Downtown has a 2-3 level underground garage as well. I just assume you need infrastructure and expensive maintenance to pull it off.
Where I live in Round Rock, I've dug in my backyard, and about a foot down is solid rock. Neighbors put in a pool, and they had jackhammers going out there for a week straight to dig the hole.
Around here in the DFW area the ground is full of clay. It's very hard to dig into and the ground shifts very easily both when it rains a lot and when it doesn't. During the summer we have to water the foundation to keep the soil up against the foundation. If you don't do that then the foundation can shift and cause cracks in the dry wall and structural problems. I once went into a house that was so bad you could feel the foundation shift under your feet as you walked. It's not ideal ground for digging into and trying to build a permanent structure. That doesn't make it impossible, just expensive. Land is cheap in Texas compared to other states. It's cheaper to build a larger house than it is to dig into the ground to put in a basement. Every once in a while you do find a house with a basement though.
They are few and far between and I think topography plays a big role in Fort Worth...with a lot of mid century and ranch style homes needing to take advantage of space without building up they are perhaps more common here than in places like Houston. While on the topic of form and design I saw a design for a modular wine cellar built into a pre cast cement drop in. http://m.concretenetwork.com/ugc/precast-wine-cellars.html <-had a good visual of what I had seen. It was billed as a super cheap way to add into existing home..assuming you know where all your pipes and shit go you could just drop one into your garage floor, but a sealed metal door on it and park over it. Either that or just drop it into the backyard and avoid the hassle.
In high school I worked on a ranch outside of Georgetown and spent many days manually digging post holes. Never more than a few minutes before we had the digging bar out trying to smash through layers of rock...fuck I hated that job.
Yeah, being from Wisconsin, it took some getting used to that pretty much no homes down here have basements......weird.....
Yea man, my uncle lived in Georgetown and digging anything out there was brutal. It's the same way in Coryell county. We had a deer lease out there and built fences around 3 corn feeders and 2 protein feeders and I don't think I ever worked that hard in my life. And I used to do landscaping before that.
