Of all the rooms I’ve built, the coolest one of all (literally) was an amazing wine “cellar”. Cellar is kind of a misnomer though. This is Florida. No, this room was right in the middle of the house and it was originally a dining room and a huge laundry room. We turned it into a wine cellar.

Without building a stitch of structure, the tab was about $200,000.00. I said it was the coolest room I’ve done. I wish I had pictures (I’m sure I do in some old floppy disk digital camera). In substitution I’ve searched online for similar stuff. This picture below is close. Bigger, but not as cool.

I wasn’t actually looking for wine cellars when I came across this picture at a blog called Love and Splendor (cool name), but I did find a few.

What I was actually searching for was pictures of the one thing that I think made that room. The thing I dream about. The thing that keeps me up at night. It’s Those real brick floors. I can still remember the way they felt, the way they smelled, and the way they looked. Wow!

We bought pallets of solid used Old Chicago brick and cut them down to thin tiles. When everything went well, we were able to get two faces from each brick and the center was recycled. But often one face would break due to the very fragile nature of a 100 year old brick being sliced to 1″ thick in a huge wet saw.

The secret to installing the brick was a very thick bed of tile setting mortar and one seriously great tile installer. He was painstakingly able to get each piece installed in a herringbone pattern like shown in the photo above from HistoricalBricks.com and, thanks to the thick mortar bed, was able to keep them relatively flat. Hard to do because they each varied somewhat in thickness.

The picture below from AcadianBrick.com shows a similar color to what we used, though when used indoors and sealed with about five coats of stone floor sealer (flat) the finished floor appeared much darker than this. It was a wine cellar after all.

Great for Patios Too!

We did these floors outdoors a number of times. It’s much easier outside because you can just use the full thickness brick.

Inside that wreaks all sorts of havoc on doorways, and transitions with other floors.

Difficult, but worth it!

Hard to install, hard to clean, expensive to buy…

Yes, a real brick floor is all of these things. But not much looks more amazing in the right setting.

If you ever get a chance to give it a try, I recommend it highly! (Old Chicago is still my favorite)