Our very old/new to us/whose been growing pot in my basement storage room

So the remodel or whatever you want to call it was supposed to be done in February- and for the most part it was.  Painting was done, carpet was in, and furniture even was all there.  Of course I'm still working on decorating but that will take me YEARS.

Then in March Taylor's dad decided to pull out a car he's had stashed in his storage unit since the 80's.  I'm not kidding.  A teal green Probe.  Not even sure what that it but it's apparently the first "cool" car his dad owned and he couldn't bear to part with it so he put it in a storage unit.  And now he's for whatever reason decided to resurrect and restore it in all it's 1980's glory.  And that freed up A LOT of space in their storage unit.  

When we bought this house from them, one of the conditions was that Taylor's mom could continue to use the storage room to store all her things.  Which was fine.  We had more rooms and space than we knew what to do with- especially after being in a 900 square foot apartment in DC with 2 kids.  So we used one of the downstairs bedrooms to store our stuff and left all of her stuff in here:

The actual storage room- not finished, lots of shelves, meant for storage.  I actually don't recall if I ever even went in their before this year.  But once all that room in their other storage unit was freed up, and since it has been 2 1/2 years of her stuff being in our house, and because we really would like to use that extra bedroom now, we helped her move her stuff out.

And I discovered this!  A random teal green refrigerator door in a cinder block wall.  Very retro and cute- but bizarre.  At first I thought it was a tornado or bomb shelter, but we don't exactly need those in Utah very often.

So I opened it up, and stuck a lamp in since there was no light.

And found this:
3 shelves on each side and across the middle... FULL ... OF... DIRT !?!?!?!?!
What!?!?!?!?
Seriously I called my mom to ask if she thought someone had had a secret pot farm in my basement.  And when I asked Taylor he said it could be because the house owner had previously lived upstairs and rented out the basement to college boys.  The little brother of a guy he works with actually lived there.  So Taylor asked this guy and then a few others at work and it turns out this home belongs in Idaho.  With all the potatoes!  Who knew?   This is a root cellar!
Apparently very common in Idaho where you harvest the potatoes once a year but eat them with every meal and they need to last 365 days.  So... you put them in a cold, dark room IN DIRT and they don't grow.  They occasionally go bad and explode (gross! this is apparently the only time most of the guys at Taylor's work who are from Idaho said they ever heard their mothers swear).
So no pot farm here.  Just old dirt... for potatoes... lots and lots of potatoes.
Unfortunately we don't eat many potatoes.  And I'm kind of in to just buying them at the store when I need them.  So maybe we can use this room for something else.  Unfortunately WHO KNOWS how old this dirt is.  And really how do you get rid of THIS MUCH DIRT... INSIDE!  And what's growing in it?  Is it from the 60's?  Are there bug larvae in there?  Or crazy old diseases?
I don't know.  And since I'm pregnant and not really sure how to deal with it anyways...

I'm just going to shut the cute little teal vintage refrigerator door (complete with tiny egg slots I might add).

And I'll just be content to use the rest of the plentiful storage room.  Dirt removal- project for some other year!

And for now, we have a freed up downstairs room that the kids aren't old enough to use as a bedroom and I think it was meant to be an excercise room anyways, so we'll use it for that will the other stuff we inherited from Taylor's parents. (ignore the boxes and extra things to be recycled.  Our one weekly can gets filled up pretty quickly so we're just slowly wittling down this pile).

And maybe one of these days we'll get all the doors in our house re-keyed so we can actually open them.  This door downstairs has never been opened by us and to my knowledge not by Taylor's parents either- so that's at least 11 years.  But it would be pretty fabulous if my kids could come in from outside...

walk past the excercise equipment... get a drink from the built in water fountain (really?  who puts one of those in their house, but hey we'll take it)... and use the bathroom... and go back outside all without stepping on my carpet!  Sounds like a plan for next summer!