Root cellar, wine cellar, or cheese cave?

My previous post showed the construction of my wine rack / cider rack that is now sitting in my leaky root cellar. The property I live on had two grain silos at one point in time. The foundations are both still there half buried in the ground. One is filled in with earth and the other I suspect was intentionally made into a root cellar. This cellar was in pretty bad shape when I got here. Water would dump in through the ceiling when it rained bringing mud and gravel with it. I'm going to detail how I bring this thing back to life and make a root cellar / wine cellar / cheese cave out of it. I suppose that people considering building a root cellar could read this and take away something. Putting a root cellar in the path of some major water runoff is a bad idea.
After four or five wheel barrows of mud and gravel were shoveled off the floor it was beginning to look like something usable.

The roof of the cellar is made up of four train rails laid across the foundation and concrete poured in around them. They set two pipes on opposite sides of the roof. These were probably used as vents.
The basic principle behind a root cellar is cool steady temperatures, and a constant level of humidity. Right now my root cellar has water running down the walls with all this rain. Not so bad for bottles of cider but bad for anything else. High humidity is important when aging cheese and storing root crops, both of which I plan to do in the near future. Actual water dripping on to my cheese however would just lead to rotten cheese. I tried using hydrolic cement but that stuff is just a pain in the ass. It dries in a matter of seconds. That makes it pretty difficult to mix more than a handful at a time. The result just looks like butt. This thing has to patched from the top. There's no way around it.

 Well after nine straight hours of digging on a Saturday I had the majority of the cellar exposed. I didnt get the entire thing uncovered mainly because I ran out of time. Monday kinda screwed things up.

 I did however clean the concrete and expose two large cracks that run along right where the water is leaking in. The cracks are in line with the train rails. Had there been another inch of concrete and I probably wouldn't be doing all this work right now.

 I decided that giving water a place to go would also help keep excess amounts of water from seeping through the walls which it does during a heavy rain. I picked up some perforated drain pipe from home depot. I think it was about 6 bucks for an 8 foot section.





Once I had enough sunshine to get things nice and dry I started applying a solvent based roofing tar. This stuff is pretty easy to use. Because its solvent based, it doesnt need to be heated. Just paint it on. I started with the most important areas first making sure they had a nice coating and then just slopped the rest down for good measure.

And just like any other mess, it always takes longer to clean it up than it did to make it. The drainage pipes just run the circumference of the root cellar and allow the water to dump into a nearby ditch. I started putting the soil back in place about two weeks ago, took this picture, and it still looks the same today. So far I haven't seen any water on the inside...