'offices': the service yard

This is the 'service yard', outside the basement work room. The service yard serves as what the English call 'offices', that is, the parts of the domicile where outside work meets inside work.
Milk buckets come in by this door; the shed you can't see on the left holds racks of drying onions, crates of potatoes to cure, ropes of garlic.
The root cellar (dead ahead) will hold the cured potatoes, and the structure on top of the root cellar will be the greenhouse (with appropriate insulation between the two).
Immediately to our left, in this picture, is the summer kitchen, where we do our canning, small butchery, fermenting, and so on.