I like the glass door idea. Easier to see what you want before losing the cold. Most exterior doors are larger than i need/can fit though. Not sure on the gravel...i am sick of the sand being dragged everywhere but i suppose crushed stone would not be as bad. Wouldn't a cement floor hold more cold....maybe that is the issue...the crush would hold cold but allow pockets of it is slip bellow the stones Keeping the flood cold with out the cold sitting on the floor. I would have to sink post or use hanging selves to be sure they were stable, building on crush means they could be dug out and under mined. Further reading suggests that i should not use this room for both perishable food and canned goods. That the moisture needed for the perishables is not good for the cans and jar lids. What to do, what to do?

Hey KSWL, I've been meaning to reply since you posted but have not been able to. After your description, I don't think "old Chicago" is what your looking for either. I used to say the same thing as everyone uses that particular term but as it turns out it was actually "old St. Louis" as what I had in mind as well. I used to have brick floors in my kitchen in my former house. They were not full brick but were pavers though they did have the look of reclaimed brick (I don't think they were shaved reclaims). I loved the look and had always wanted brick flooring in my house as that is flooring staple in Louisiana. However, I don't think mine were sealed properly. They never felt clean as it always felt like the individual sands of the grout were coming out. It broke my habit of walking barefoot on the floor. But again, I think this is because mine were not sealed properly (neither was the tile countertop). I currently have brick in my den similar in looks to Lynne's. It is from the fifties and it amazingly tough. I too though like Lynn would love to find a steamer that can really handle them. Like I said above, brick flooring is ubiquitous here. It is one of the go to flooring choices. Most use reclaimed brick which is my favorite. I am not sure what the prices are for "new" old brick now but if you look on Ebay there are usually pallets of reclaimed for sale at decent prices. The main point of my ramble was that if you find the right type of brick and it is installed and sealed properly they should be no problem. Hayes Town, the famous Louisiana architect used them almost exclusively along with heart pine and bluestone. The floors in his homes still look amazing today. He had a special beeswax finish that he used on them and swore by it. I don't have a good picture of my old floors but will try to get a couple my current floors and a couple of Hayes Town brick photos uploaded so you can see them.

Update: The comments here are valuable to me, and much appreciated! We haven't yet de-hoarded enough of our 45+ year collection of stuff to dare start trying to sell our home; also, none of the places we've been looking at with realtors have made us eager to move just yet. We just know that one or both of us (or our older daughter) will have to sell it one day and we're doing what we can to pre-smooth that task. So, while we keep trying to sell old treasures online (or give them away or throw them away, depending!) we've decided to try to get an estimate for having the cellar floor evened out and a trench dug along two sides adjacent to the corner where the water comes in. I spent many hours last summer re-shaping the yard to drain away, to no avail. The water table's got to be high there. Not surprising, as there's an ancient dug well (now dry) under the pantry floor. The image of a "stream" crossing a cellar conjured up crystalline waters, maybe a cattail or two, and the chance of a trout for supper. Well, our stream starts as a patch of dampness across flat clay that drains into a 2 inch by 2 inch trench. The trench makes a 90 degree turn around the wood furnace slab then runs past a few volunteer mushrooms (descendants of escapees from a mushroom growing kit we bought a few years ago), and ends in a pit dug in the sandy side of the cellar. It's observed by two quietly curious salamanders, who live in tiny caves they burrowed under a jack post footing and an uncut fieldstone slab that was probably too much bother to remove when the cellar-diggers found it around 1799. You'd have to be about an inch tall to view this as a stream, and even so you probably wouldn't be tempted to sip the water... unless you were a salamander, of course. Again, many thanks. Your comments are all kind and encouraging.

Thanks. I wanted to find out how deep the brick wall goes so in one small place near the wall I dug. After removing maybe two or a little more centimetres of sand I found the bricks didn't go deeper on the wall (and the floor itself just appeared to be more packed sand). So, the bricks a person sees as the bottom row of the wall (and one can see them without digging) are the bottom row of the wall. Except for that two or three centimeters of sand floor that rises above the very bottom of that first row of bricks, the bricks do not go deeper. I looked at diagrams of footers, and at least on this place of the wall, there is none. I know there should be, but it appears to just be a brick wall that goes directly into the sand. There was no footer there and I could take my finger and go under the brick near where I had dug and I found only sand (After that experiment I put the sand back and packed it) From the diagram, the sand floor is about where it should be, of course there should also be a footer that is under the floor (or in this case, the sand floor! Believe me though, there isn't. If I were to do any change it would be to make the sand floor as deep as the brick wall itself (remove about two centimetres of sand) and make the sand floor even with the lowest part of the bricks. But if that sand that rises above the bottom of the bricks is essential to stability, maybe especially so because there seems to be no footer. Since it seems that the complete floor of the vaulted part of the cellar is two-four centimetres above where the first row of bricks start (it does not cover the first row, just a part of the side of the first row of bricks) maybe another alternative might be to leave the sand at what may be its historic placement along the side of the brick wall, and to leave the sand floor largely alone a distance about 10 (or 15) centimetres from the wall and there be dug one or two centimetres below the level of the sand that is next to the bricks. Instinctively it does not seem that this would have any impact on stability and it would give the additional height for the majority of the centre of the vaulted room. But instinct is not engineering. What is your thought? It's not a large house (only two large bedrooms, kitchen, and a half room that was the original entry way but was still room enough for a coffee table, chairs/sofa and a big radio - in a similar style as a nearby 1927 house - yes, the entrance also seemed to be the only room in some of these small houses which it seems were sometimes adapted, as not only the entrance but a kind of small living room - the people here later changed it into a bedroom). That old entry room was not tiny, but not huge thus designated a half room. Many of the people had and have now chickens and their own gardens (it's in a rural farming area). But it has an elegant wrought iron fence and an art deco edifice. It's hard to imagine that these people would have servants, but people forget that many middle class families had servants at that time, so maybe they did have one. An odd thing about this kind of house is that it is small, but simultaneously massive. 3 metre seven centimetres high ceilings and exterior walls outside that make the house seem huge when in reality it is not. I have to hand it to the 1930s architects. Well done!