OT- Building a residential walk in refrigerator and meat processing room - OT

Yep, we are building a walk in fridge under the house. 
Why?  Well, that is a long story that I will (try) to make short. 

Some of you may be aware that I know a guy who has been raising some pigs in true free range fashion over the last couple of years. They have free range over a few acres to eat what they want and we supplement the rest, being careful what we feed them.  At first I would stop by and help here and there. Then he would slaughter a pig and we would butcher it together. We would save the prime cuts, grind other cuts for ground pork, and make sausage from some of the rest. We would use as much of the animal as we could. For those of you that have done this, you know it is a lot of work; however, we both love it.  The quality of pork has been fantastic, and last year we raised sheep for the first time that was purely sublime.

Over many conversations, drinks and meals, we have realized that we that we had/have a very strong mutual interest to take the time, effort and energy to grow our meat as it was done throughout history before large scale commercial farming was a thing.

Over the last two or so years, we have found good sources to procure different types and breeds of animals: cows, sheep, goats, pigs, and of course some poultry. We have tried several breeds and have come up with our short and medium term “herd plan”.

What we quickly realized was our biggest constraint, was access to a large enough clean working space and cold storage when it was time to process an animal. Up to this point, we have been making it work with folding tables, temporary setups, and needed cold weather to create a makeshift butcher shop to process an animal or two. Things had to come together perfectly for it all to work. If not, and it was time for an animal to be slaughtered, we had to take it somewhere to have it done for us.

Instead of reacting so often, we decided to take things into our own hands to have as much control as possible. Having the animals, we needed to step up our processing game big-time and quickly.

Here is the story of the build....

This is the earliest picture we have of this space. Floor dug down to grade, and stone bed rough graded.  4” foam board and drain in the back right ready to go.


Below is immediately after the rear part of the concrete slab was poured.  We insulated the floor with the 4” foam board, then poured a 4” pad. The pipe on the back right wall is going from the drain with a macerating pump in it, which will be able to pump out any liquids and small solids when we clean the room without fear of clogging. The room slopes back toward the drain. 


Since you never know what you are going to need, or when, we also proactively ran tubing for radiant floor heating. We do not have a picture of the tubing in place, but here it is coming into the room and down to slab level. The foam board and temporary bracing was used to hold additional concrete behind it to fill in some voids. This is the part of the room which will have the least amount of insulation. 


Once the concrete cured enough, the second part of the slab was poured. This part is not going to be climate controlled, so we put foam board as a separation between the slabs. In the picture below, because the door will be to the left with the hinge on the left wall opening out, that portion had to be level. Then we added a few inches “just to be sure”. That brings us to where the 2x4 is. The section between the brick and the 2x4 has a 2” drop going away from the brick.  


Once all that was in place, we started on the walls. We used allthread so we could try to make this, the toughest wall, vertical and flat.