• went into the crawlspace and added extra insulation under the area where the closet was.
• attached 1/4" firing strips to all of the walls and the ceiling using a staple gun (so they could be removed later without too much damage to the sheet rock). We spaced these 2' apart.
• Starting with the ceiling, we ran a bead of construction cement along each strip and pressed cut-to-sized sheets of 1" thick foam board to the strips. This stuff is great .. it's easy to cut to size (comes in 4'x8' sheets) and is light enough that the glue held it in place just fine. We continued this along all of the walls.
• We took off the old interior door to the closet and replaced it with a steel, insulated door. We then glued a sheet of the foam to the door also.
• We attached weather stripping along all three sides of the door opening and along the floor under the door. We made this tight enough so that the door was fairly hard to open and close
• we had chosen a Breezair as our cooling unit. We choose the floor mount model since we were didn't want to have to go through and walls. ( See the "Cooling/Heating your cellar for more info ).
• Since we were right over a crawlspace we choose to use the benefits of the cooler air there as our air source and exhaust. If you don't mind cutting through a wall, you can always use a connecting room for these. The unit comes with grate that really doesn't look all that bad.
• we carefully cut the required opening in the floor of the closet (NOTE: only cut the flooring and subflooring .. NOT the joists under the floor).
• Using the same 1" foam board that we used on the walls, and that wonderful construction material .. Duct Tape .. we formed a ductwork for the intact/exhaust at the back of the breezaire .. you can see a drawing of this here

• For racking we used to "college bookshelf" method ... cinderblocks with 1x12 boards stacked up .. it was ugly, kinda clumsy, but it worked !!

This closet cellar worked well for us for several years. Total cost of materials (not including the Breezair ) was around $250 .. most of this expense came from the steel insulated door.