The last 3 years I have been building a homestead from raw wooded acreage when we left the city. I also started making maple syrup for the first time since living up here in northern Minnesota. The first year I built a small house for the wife and I. Last fall I built a garage. This year we added our second greenhouse which meant we needed a root cellar. I also needed a good place to make maple and birch syrup. Rather than having two separate building sites, I thought, why not just stack the sugar shack on top of the root cellar? I don't know how lay brick so I decided to build this with tamarack. Some of you may know it as larch. I wrapped the root cellar with roofing felt paper and then 6 mil plastic.
For the concrete posts, I put a heavy duty steel fence post in the block openings and filled them with concrete. The root cellar is an 8'x 10' building and the sugar shack is 12'x 20'.
My plan is to filter and gravity drain the sap into barrels in the root cellar. I will then use an RV pump to pump the cold sap up to the sugar shack. The water in my well comes out at 41 F in the summer. This should be beneficial at the end of maple and throughout the birch syrup season.

root cellar.jpg

root cellar with concrete posts.jpg

root cellar with dirt.jpg

sugar shack beam.jpg

sugar shack floor joists.jpg