What is this small enclosed room in my basement for?

January 18, 2011 8:29 AM

I have a small concrete* room in my basement, and I'm trying to figure out what it's original purpose might have been and if it's structural (as in, can it be removed).

My house is ~100 years old and it's a "four square". The room is in one corner, so that two of it's walls are outside walls (as you can see in the picture, on one of those walls it has a window). The other two walls are also concrete (as in, those that it shares with the otherwise open basement. The wall opposite the window has a door in it, but the long non-outside facing wall perpendicular to the window has a weird feature to it. It's a really thick concrete wall that dips in at the top as you can see in these two pictures ( [1] [2]). It might be a bit hard to tell from the picture, but the room is basically 5' x 10' or so (I'm guessing at those dimensions). Oh, and uh, pardon the mess, I'm renovating in there.

So I have two questions:

1) What was the original purpose of this room?
2) How can I tell if the wall can be removed.


*I'm using concrete in the sense that it's not obviously to my eyes brick or wood, I'm not really positive if it's concrete or not.

posted by KirTakat to Home & Garden (18 answers total)

It looks like a cold storage room. You would use it to store vegetables, etc. The earth around the outside of its walls keeps it cool. These rooms were more useful before the invention of fridges.
posted by Paquda at 8:36 AM on January 18, 2011 [3 favorites]

It sounds like a coal cellar to me. A place to store coal for heating - the window would be where the coal was loaded in from outside.
posted by sciencegeek at 8:38 AM on January 18, 2011 [4 favorites]

A coal room, perhaps?
posted by Reverend John at 8:39 AM on January 18, 2011

I would also vote for a cold storage room, although the presence of an outside window makes me wonder if it was originally for coal storage and the window replaced what was once the coal chute.
posted by mikeh at 8:39 AM on January 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

If that wall that you want to remove continues in the floor above, it is probably load bearing. You could also look in the attic to see the location of your vertical supports. May not be much help, but if you search "how to tell if a wall is load bearing," you'll get tons of results. Generally useful.

Another option is to hire a reputable building inspector to help you out. (Their time is generally less expensive than any engineer.)
posted by Kronur at 8:44 AM on January 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think it's a coal room. The chute from the coal truck would have emptied in to a hatch where the window is now. Coal dust is nasty and where the coal is dumped is best sealed off from the rest of the house.
posted by readery at 8:48 AM on January 18, 2011

And bottom line, it can be tricky to determine without an expert opinion. There are a million what-ifs. You don't want everything to start falling down, so don't remove it without being positive!
posted by Kronur at 8:49 AM on January 18, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks everyone! Seems like the consensus might be leaning towards coal room, but at least I have a couple of better guesses than my "Where they keep the bad children?" I usually gave when asked.

And I need to bring in a structural engineer anyways to look at a crack in my basement wall, so I might as well add this to the list of questions.

Anyone have a recommendation for a structural engineer in Chicago?
posted by KirTakat at 8:52 AM on January 18, 2011

IANAE (I am not an engineer, but grew up with one for a father). Yeah, that's a coal bin. As for whether or not you can remove the wall, that is entirely impossible to tell from the photos that you have posted. Most likely, you can remove it, but depending on how things have settled (you are in chicago, so your house is probably built on fill, and so it has probably settled) and what your basement walls are made of (most likely unreinforced brick with stucco on top), you may also cause serious problems, even if the wall was originally not structural. For example, that wall may now be holding up the basement wall, and the corner of your house will collapse (either slowly, or rarely and more dangerously, quickly) if you remove it. As a most basic check, you need to get into the basement ceiling and see if any floor joists terminate on the top of that wall.

Find yourself a structural engineer who will can take a look at your house. If you recently purchased it, your home inspector may be able to put you in touch with one. They should be able to give you an answer quickly and for not that much money.

on preview, yes, indeed add this to the list of questions for the engineer! I don't know any in the Chicagoland area though. Good luck!
posted by rockindata at 8:56 AM on January 18, 2011

Since you're in Chicago - I TOTALLY agree that it was a coal room. this is what the window replaced.

I love walking around and seeing all the old coal chutes that haven't been taken out of the old buildings.
posted by bibliogrrl at 9:07 AM on January 18, 2011

Ha, that's what the cold-war bomb shelter in my grandma's basement looks like, except hers is a little bigger. We use it for food storage and call it "the dungeon".
posted by dreamyshade at 9:27 AM on January 18, 2011

We had a very similar room in our house when we lived in Manhattan, KS, but it was actually an oil room and not a coal room. It took a long time to figure out what the weird pipes heading out of the room to various parts of the house and backyard were. We also had a very odd old oil tank in the garage when we moved in. We used the room to store our canned stuff and paints because it never got very hot or cold.

I agree that this is probably a coal room, but there are oil rooms in some areas as well. The two can be very similar and today I don't think it matters much what it was, but what it can be, as long as it's properly cleaned up.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 9:37 AM on January 18, 2011

Slightly off topic, but related in a way: holes in your house that aren't used anymore.

Another archaic home feature was the milk door which was a hole cut into the wall of your house with doors on each side. The milkman would leave the milk inside and you could pick it up from inside.

When I was a kid, my friend's house had one of these and when we were small enough, we could climb through when we were locked out.
posted by sciencegeek at 9:37 AM on January 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: ScienceGeek, we had a milk door in our condo actually! It was covered on the inside, so you couldn't open it, but from the outside it was clearly visible.
posted by KirTakat at 9:43 AM on January 18, 2011

The indent looks like the bottom half of a structural concrete beam which probably couldn't be moved. Without knowing what is in the rest of the basement it is hard to tell. A quick test on the wall is to try and drill into it to see how thick it is and the composition.
posted by JJ86 at 11:32 AM on January 18, 2011

It may have been concrete to act as fire barrier. In which case, it may have been walled off from the rest of the cellar, and may not be structural.

However, if the 1st floor ground plan conforms to this - a 5' x 10' room in the same corner of the house - it may be structural.
posted by carter at 11:57 AM on January 18, 2011

Structural engineer here. It does indeed appear to be a coal room. It's hard to say anything else without seeing construction drawings or looking at the rest of the house. Since you're already planning on having a structural engineer out to inspect another issue in the house, do go ahead and have him inspect this room as well. The additional cost should be negligible or zero, and you'll likely need a professional opinion on it anyway unless you have construction drawings that show they're definitely (or definitely not) load-bearing walls.
posted by hootenatty at 12:33 PM on January 18, 2011

We had a weird little room like that in our house years ago. Didn't think the house was old enough for it to be a coal room, but you never know - we assumed it was a root cellar or cold room. The house did have a wood door though, a little box for storing firewood outside the house, with an interior door that opened into the room my brother and I shared in the basement. Originally there was a wood stove in that room, before my dad removed it. We used to use the wood door as an escape hatch in high school, so that we could sneak out and go marauding around the countryside without the parents knowing we were leaving (leaving/reentering through the front or back doors would have been too noisy and too obvious!).
posted by caution live frogs at 2:04 PM on January 18, 2011