Bogey hole

 Messing around with the doors it occurred to me that when the basement gets glued on there will be a huge waste of space under the outside stairs.  In real life this surely would have been a bogey hole off the original kitchen or servants' hall.  It would have been useful for storing barrels of water and buckets of coal for the range for example.

I mocked up the wall with a hole cut in and a door in place.  

small access to a big space

It can be a full height door because that does give access to a handy shelf as well as the five feet high storage underneath the stairs.  This would have been just a slight stoop even for adults in the mid eighteenth century.  Mostly one of the youngsters would be sent to fetch coal or water or whatever, so the lack of height is not a real constraint.

This eight by six and a half feet cupboard has now been cleaned out for a storage space for the family.  It is accessed off the mud room and will hold all sorts of junk.  I am just living in hopes I can 'dress' the area much further down the line without it being too much of a nightmare .  Right now I can't bear the thought of the build grinding to a halt while I source 'junk' for the bogey hole before I can glue the basement to the doors. I can see the problems of filling a large space through a small access later on....  but I do love a challenge.

fiberglass brick finish

This is the brick 'paper' I used for the walls.  It is a really good product from Jennifers of Walsall.  If I didn't use versi-brick on the outside of my houses this is what I would use instead.  it is a terrific texture right down to its gritty mortar between the joints.  It is even Flemish bonded brick!  Perfect.

I have a sheet for all kinds of odds and ends like bricking inside fireplace chimneys for example.  You can then dirty it up with paint but still have the texture of old brick.

big space

This is the finished space.  The floor was done in the same way as the random slabs in the areas but this time I cut all the leftover slabs I had into the same size squares to make it easier for me to cover the area.  Cutting them is easy as every shape is based on this basic square.  Also, with fitting random shaped stuff you find that you have favoured one shape more than another so the leftovers are never very random.  It would have been a challenge to use them as they were.

[Note on 'bogey hole'...... not sure if this is a widely-used term?  It is a word from my Brummie childhood when any under-stair cupboard or similar nook or cranny got filled with 'it might come in handy' type junk.  So, in response to phrases like: "Where's the old green lamp?" the response invariable was, "It's in the bogey hole".  Not a place to rummage around in for anyone not liking spiders.]