Pull-Out Wine Shelf/Wine Rack for Our Basement Wine Cellar
How much of this story do you want to know? If "very little," then feel free to just look at the photos. They're in reverse chronological order because, quite frankly, this started as a pretty ugly project.
Okay, the story: We had been storing our wine in a basement room where the original owners (the house is a 1931 Tudor) kept the food they had canned. It was a good spot for the wine since it stayed fairly cool. However, the wine was sitting on makeshift shelves of dusty rough-hewn scrap lumber.
What I came up with – the final project you see below – was a wine rack with two-tiered pull-out shelves. See, here's the thing: typical wine racks generally don't let you see which bottle is which. That's okay if you buy wine by the case or have a gentleman's personal gentleman, but we have a panoply (well, hodgepodge) of wines and no personal attendants. So I thought about it and decided that building the shelves deep, with two tiers, would let me pull out one shelf and view 14 bottles of wine at once. (For those of you who object that this agitates and possibly bruises the wine: Seriously? I'm from Wisconsin. I ain't the King of Prussia or something! Dammit! Sorry... That was uncalled for.)
Anyway... Oh, right. So with 8 shelves with 14 bottles per shelf, the system can hold 112 bottles. The rails can hold 100 pounds, double the weight of the wine. The shelves are made with 1/2" plywood, and the carcass is made with 3/4" plywood. I've anchored the carcass to the wall and there's an outlet on the lower shelf for a wine fridge. (It's really a dorm fridge. But don't tell anyone.) But, since I've tagged this thing with words like "innovation" and "carpentry," I should try to show how this exhibits those qualities.
The photo below shows the system as I fit it into the space. The room is quite narrow, just under 4-1/2 feet wide. I used a Kreg Jig for the assembly, and that made for a pretty strong carcass. The back had to be left open for the installation but I later covered that up with a piece of laminated, um, dang, I don't know what it's called, kinda like particle board but not really. Yeah. That stuff.
I debated for a while about how to level the frame. I considered using shims but eventually decided (and was very glad I did) to block off the small area of the floor and pour self-leveling cement. Two hours doing that saved me many more hours of frustration.
I made the carcass 23" deep to accommodate the 20" deep shelves. This left some extra space for the necks of the wine bottles to extend through the holes. Beginner's mistake: The back pieces I used to strengthen the frame caused me to lose 3/4", and I've found that some longer bottles hit against those pieces. My solution is to put those longer bottles on the bottom tier, but I could have prevented this by making the frame a couple of inches deeper.
This photos is one shelf in the gluing stage. I'm not very adept at assembly, and I don't have that good of a shop, so my strings of profanity made the neighborhood blush. I had to buy a few more clamps but, well, there you have it. It's been stained and poly'd [sic], but the thing about plywood is that it's hard to get it really smooth because every cut is both with the grain and against the grain. I would consider using a lot more poly the next time I do a project similar to this. I really like the grain of plywood but it does have a roughness to it, especially where the holes were cut out. Plywood is not a friend of round holes.
This next photo is a cutaway of the shelf. I had to collect a few empty wine bottles – a tough job but someone had to do it – to ensure I had the correct spacing for a typical 750 ml bottle. I glued the 1/2" x 1-1/4" spacers in place. This was a tedious task, and something that a wiser man would've made a template for. Instead i measured the distance for each piece. I should note that I made the shelf pieces in a real shop rather than at home. I had a drill press for cutting the holes for the bottle necks.
Doing the shelves in tiers was, I think, the real innovation. And the pull-out shelves. I looked on the web to find plans for something like this but wasn't able to find anything. I wouldn't be so bold as to say it was created from whole cloth, but, heck, why don't I? Yes! Whole cloth dammit! I think that it ultimately made the project simpler. I only needed 8 sets of rails rather than 16.
Finally, for those of you who are still reading (Anyone? Anyone?), a couple of panoramic photos. The first is what the room looked like in the mid-construction phase. I insulated the ceiling so our kitchen floor (which is above it) would stay warmer and so the room itself would stay cooler. The walls had been plastered, but that was torn out so I could wire in some electricity for the fridge and for lights. There will be photos in the room, eventually, and a curtain dividing the storage area on the left from the wine cellar area. It would've been nice to have a smaller room that was a dedicated wine cellar, but, well, it's an old house and I ain't no millionaire so, well, there you have it.
