Custom Wine Cellars Orange County Wine Geek Part Two – A Processed Video Transcription

Custom Wine Cellars Orange County Wine Geek Part 2 .

The Wine Cellar Construction Process

Tim: People produce a lot of pictures where there’s nobody in it and it’s always good to give it scale and perspective if there’s somebody in the picture.

Leslie:  We’re talking about my liquid children and they’re in the photo.

Tim:  Indeed.  So we’ve got some great pictures from start to finish.  We could just take a quick tour of the wine cellar construction process.  These are all to do with the cellar, right?

Leslie:  Yes.  Basically what I did was took some pre-photos.  These were the kind of things that I was sharing with Jerry.  I think I remember sharing this exact album with Jerry that basically said ‘here is what my house looks like; here’s the wall, here’s this situation, here’s that situation,’ just to give him an idea of what I was thinking about doing and where.  So that was the wall, the one that you’re really on and it even says in the comments that I really wanted to ditch that wall.  My goal was to ditch that entire wall which didn’t happen and honestly saved me probably $30,000.

Tim:  That’s a reasonable amount.

Leslie:  The AC amount would have been huge because it would have been this nice, clear open and then the wine cellar construction amount on top of it.

Tim:  I’m guessing that it’s useful to see the house as the wine cellar design is done.  It helps to make sure that the style of the cellar is in keeping with the style of the house.

Jerry:  Certainly with color schemes and the species of the wood.  If the home is more contemporary styling then typically there’s a stain or a topcoat or a clear coat finish put over them.  Some homes are a bit more rustic and have distressed areas like distressed flooring, beams in the ceiling, so we would use something like we used at Sea Smoke.

Tim:  In these pictures, does it give us an indication as to where the cellar is in relation to the rest of the house?

Leslie:  Yes and no.  The very first photo you see is my front door.  You’re looking at my two front doors while one front door is missing, my living room, and then the wine cellar which has obviously now been replaced with a wine cellar door.

Tim:  Is that here?

Leslie:  Yes.  That’s my custom wine cellars Orange County now.  I did the same thing when I renovated my house because I do so much work in social media and everyone loved the experience so much that I thought I had to do this.  On my one bulletin board, it’s actually the most viewed thread this year that people have been watching.  I mean, who doesn’t love watching change happen, fun change like this?

Jerry:  That’s a great picture of the custom wine cellars Orange County there.  That’s the closet that we’re utilizing.

Tim:  Oh, okay.  Now I can relate it to those wine cellar design drawings.  We’re looking sort of this way and that’s where it’s built into the closet.  Very good!

Leslie:  I don’t miss that ugly fan one bit.  I was so happy with the day I asked to be able to throw it out and they actually let me.  So that was great.

Jerry:  You retained that beautiful flooring, though, did you not?

Leslie:  Yes, the flooring is still in there.  My concern is that I tried my best to see if it had plastic underneath it because it is an on concrete slab, so I just have to hope that whoever installed the item before me did indeed put it on plastic below it.  So far it’s been fine.  So we’ll see.

Tim:  This is the April 1st picture.  This is a picture of your completed custom wine cellars Orange County on April 1st?

Leslie:  Yes, absolutely done!  Absolutely!  I keep the wines in the trash bags that you see in the corner.

Wine Cellar Insulation – Installation of Vapor Barriers

Tim:  What are they doing here?  Ripping out all the insulation in there?

Leslie:  All of the drywall had to come down and all the insulation.  Obviously I didn’t think it through but it had to come out of the ceiling as well.  So this was day one and all they did on day one was rip it down and take out all the insulation, and then of course we had closing the window, taking the AC out.  We had to cap the AC and move it.  All that fun stuff.

Actually my power went off that day.  It was pretty funny.  This is the wall where the AC sits now.  You’ll see that you can see half and then not.  The top actually goes to my bedroom because I’m in a tri-level house.  So that leads to my closet and that leads to my bedroom and below is walk-in storage that goes the entire width of my house.  It’s kind of funny when this photo was taken.  I had no idea just how much my bedroom fed into that level, but that’s how much it feeds into it.

Tim:  You’re so good, so many pictures.

Leslie:  Oh, I tried.  So April 4th was a fun photo.  I came home and I’m like, “Wow, that’s interesting.”  Obviously the day that the window came down, it actually had termite damage on the window and they were going to enclose the entire window again and I said to them no because if I do sell the house in the future and if they don’t like wine, I want to try to be able to put this room back.  So they actually just reframed it and I think two or three photos in from here, you’ll see that they actually reframed it to still be a window.  My hope is that it never happens or happens many, many, many, many years down the line, but it is actually framed within the dry wall to be a window again if needed.

Jerry:  That show’s it all boarded up and framed up.

Tim:  Clearly thinking ahead there.

Leslie:  Well, you know, the thing is that I either depreciated this house by quite a bit or I appreciate it for someone who buys this house in the future.  My hope is that I live here many, many, many years from now very happy and all that good stuff.  If I was looking for a house and I saw a custom wine cellars Orange County like this, I would probably think about changing cities to head to a house and I realized that those people might be out there, but not everyone’s like that.

Tim:  April 4th, April 6th

Leslie:  A little bit more progress with the wine cellar construction.  They closed up the window which for the longest time they forgot to paint which was pretty entertaining.  This was interesting; they started to put up the insulation and forgot to put up the vapor barrier.  I remember calling Jerry and saying, “Jerry!” He was like, “Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, no!  The vapor barrier needs to go up.”  So they started putting the vapor barrier up and then they realized that the paper had to come down because you can’t have the vapor barrier and then paper because it creates a double vapor barrier.  I learned quite a bit during this wine cellar design and wine cellar construction process.

Jerry:  The vapor barrier needs to be behind the insulation in this process.

Leslie:  And it wasn’t happening.  So you’ll see in this photo they just started putting up the vapor barrier and then they had to rip down all the paper.  Thank goodness I was posting this.  In all honesty, I love my contractor but he wasn’t aware of a couple of things that he should’ve been aware of and a lot of my friends on a wine bulletin board are actually wonderful in helping out.

Tim:  So now we’re on April 7th.

Leslie:   It’s scary that I remember these days.  You’re not going to see too much changes here, just the paper being removed in some places, more insulation being added, and then after this the lights were put in and were actually working.

Tim:  April 9th through 14th

Leslie:  This is a cute story.  This is when the process was going so weird that I didn’t know what to do and I was going out of town.  I was going to be in Arizona for the weekend.  As you know I love taking photos of everything, so I got a little concerned because I was going to be out of town.  So I left my little Sony portable camera in the room and all the contractors when they came in to work actually took photos when they were done for the day.  This was all of my contractors and workers taking photos, which I thought was very sweet.

Tim:  I noticed they’re studiously not in the photos.

Leslie:  There it is.  There’s a shoulder shot of one of them.

Tim:  I noticed here there are some instances where there’s paper and there’s instances where there isn’t paper.  What’s that about?

Leslie:  It’s just simply because they hadn’t gotten around to it yet.  If you go down a few photos more, you’ll see all of the paper being removed which is how it should be done.

Tim:  So this is the sheetrock ready to go in?

Leslie:  Yes, that’s the drywall ready to go.

Tim:  April 15th and it looks like it starting to take shape now.

Leslie:  This is the weirdest thing because this is when the temperature level of this room completely changed.  This was just because of the tape and the mud and everything, but this was exciting to start to see happen.

Tim:  I don’t understand what you mean by the temperature of the room changed.

Leslie:  Someone said that when you start getting into tape and mud and all that, it creates its own kind of moisture level and this room was considerably warm than the rest of my house.  I mean, it was almost stiflingly warm to be in there.  This was just standard.  Once this whole room was taped, it was crazy hot.  I would walk in there and I almost couldn’t breathe and other people felt the same way.

Jerry: Which is a sign that it’s a good airtight room.

Leslie:  Yes, someone said to me that it is such a good sign, you don’t even know.  So I was happy to hear that.

Tim:  What are we looking at here?

Leslie:  I had to move my attic space because my attic space was currently in the closet.  So I had to move it to this area and if you look there is a crack riding across.  That’s from additional termite damage.  We just decided to tackle all of this at once and reput the attic access there, reframed a couple of things that had some termite damage, and took care of that.

Tim:  So what is that?

Leslie:  It’s just the controller screen and for the longest time it had tape all around it.  Everyday I’d show up and it would be in a different position.  I just loved the fact that if this thing makes it through this construction process, I’d be so proud of it.

Custom Wine Cellar Refrigeration

Jerry:  We used ductless split wine cellar refrigeration system, Tim.

Tim:  We’re getting there now.  It’s starting to look really interesting.  What have we got here?

Leslie:  April 18th was when this room was just crazy.  You’ll see there’s a fan smack down in the middle.  It was so damp and warm in there.  This was when I was getting fed up with all the dust, but it’s so fun looking back to this.  Watching the progress is fun.

Tim:  What’s this?

Leslie:  Remember what I told you about the side storage that I have?  That’s my side storage and they were using that area as a pass through.  I just noticed I was actually back there on that day because ATT was here because I was going to wire the house for ATT pulse and I was happy they got to pass through backup.  But that’s the side storage and that is the half wall you saw on the very first photo that was completely open to my storage.  You’ll see the wine cellar refrigeration lines heading down and you’ll get a good chuckle if you look all the way to the left, you’re going to see what looks like wine racking wrapped up in plastic.  That would be my very first wine storage system, probably five years ago.  It held 50 bottles and I thought I would never need more.

Tim:  It looks like they taped off the area they’re working because you definitely don’t want dust on the nice, wide screen TV there.

Remote Temperature Gauge with Bottle Probe

Leslie:  I don’t know if you guys know about this device.  This is from a company called Weather Direct and this thing rocks.  It is a remote temperature gauge that also has a bottle probe, so I can have it give me air temperature as well as bottle temperature.  And I can set the ping amount, so I can ping it every day, ping it every hour, ping it every 5 minutes, and then I can say to it when you ping it and the parameter is not met (e.g. it’s too warm, too humid, not humid enough) send me a text message and send me an email.

Tim:  This screen that we’re seeing is presented on…

Leslie:  You’re looking at the web screen.  So it’s telling you at the top it says wine cellar, it’s saying when it was last seen, and then the last measured values.  Of course, the AC wasn’t on and running at this time, but I’ve got the device and it was just sitting around my house and so I had it for fun toggling at 73 degrees and you’ll see that in red it saying that the notified parameter was met on both temperature and humidity.

Jerry:  So it’s an alarm system for you?

Leslie:  Absolutely.  And it’s also one way of testing the AC because I’m getting different temperatures obviously near the AC system to the floor to the ceiling to the wall that feeds in to my backyard.  They all are varying by a tiny bit.  This has been really neat to be able to take this device and move it and just get a feel for the different temperatures that are happening around the room which is great and a lot of my wine buddies who have custom wine cellars Orange County use this.  It has two pieces. The part itself that goes into the cellar and there’s another piece that needs an Ethernet connection.  Up in my office, I have the other part that is hooked up into my wireless router and it has reception from I believe 200 feet away.  It works great and it has a mobile website.  I actually have on my phone a mobile website and it will tell me what temperature my wine cellar is any time I want to know.

Tim:  We are definitely dealing with a geek here.

Leslie:  The AC guy told me these things are fantastic.  I have to agree and it’s a whopping $60.

Tim:  You could be somewhere in a different state or you’re in a meeting somewhere and you could just say, “Excuse me a moment my wine cellar is calling me.”

Leslie:  Absolutely.

This custom wine cellars Orange County is a project of Wine Cellars by Coastal.