The Cabinet

I like to write about my cabinet here. Why? Because I'm secretly, and maybe even openly, very proud of my cabinet full of liquid joy.
Not only am I really happy with the collection forming in this cabinet, I also made it myself!

Storage and show

Being a self proclaimed snob, I really wanted te be able to show my collection.
I needed to store my bottle's in a way that I liked. Before the cabinet, My collection was huddled together in a single block shelve of an Ikea Kallax closet.
That just was not enough.

So why was it in the Kallax? Why not act sooner?
I wanted a globe bar. You know, those big bar globes that you can lift the top of and show a fancy collection of glasses and bottles. And I have searched. A lot. But I just could not find the one I really liked. Or, to be honest, one that was approved by the lady of the house as being "Living room friendly".

And in the meanwhile, my collection grew. And I realized that a globe could not store all of my bottles. So an other option needed to be explored.
After seeing some great idea's on the web of homemade shelves and cabinets, I decided to go for it. With my own two left hands, I would build my showcase!

First I drew a few ideas on paper. I wanted a cabinet that had shelves with fancy brass or copper pipes as a safety rail for my bottles. But I also needed light. Then I started to make my first mistakes. I measured a bottle and used that as a base height for the space between the shelves. Still on paper, I noticed that I got odd numbers and when drawing, I got a new bottle that was much larger than the bottle I measured. Also, I could not decide on how to work with the "half-shelves". I wanted the shelves to reach to the middle of the sideboards. This way, the bottles, in theory, would have a shade and would not be in direct sunlight. Finding myself useless, I postponed the idea and put my drawings away.

Then my father in law came along. And this guy knows how to do carpentry. So in a short two hours, we not only perfected my drawings, we also drove to the hardware store and got a bunch of planks in the right size made of douglas fir. And the backboards.
That's where I was left alone again. The ingredients were laying on the floor of my home office for 2 weeks before I could get myself together to start the work. But when I started, I could not be stopped.

I started by connecting two long planks with crossbars, did this again for the other side and then just nailed it all together.
Frankly, I was surprised about how firm and steady the frame was with just nails. Adding the backboards would only make the frame more solid.

I painted the backboard petrol blue. I like that color and I needed a dark background for the cabinet. This may have been a small mistake I did not see coming, since the place I wanted the cabinet to be had a white wall and so the contrast would be there. However, the cabinet currently is at a wall that is also painted in a petrol blue. Which means dark blue on dark blue. So no contrast.

The douglas fir I used has a kind of reddish taint. I loved how the grain in the wood looked and thought about painting of greywashing the cabinet. But then I would lose the reddish color. So I decided to go very old school on this cabinet. After a final sanding, I used natural beeswax with a light brown coloring and rubbed it into the planks. The result was a very industrial looking cabinet. This strategy was not preferred by my wife, since the whole house smelled like that beeswax mixture for days.
After the waxing and drying, I added the backboards. I love how the color of the wood matches the petrol blue in style.

Then I needed to buy copper pipes. Or so I thought. Because in the end, I did not.
As I mentioned earlier, I wanted the cabinet to contain lights. So I got myself three LED-strips. I could not place those strips anywhere in the cabinet, without being visible as a thin white stripe. Unless I placed them on the back of the pipes.
I experimented with tape or glue, but the stripe would not stay straight on the pipes. Thats when I decided to buy a wooden rail, flatten one side a little so I could place the strips on the rail, and paint the rail with a copper spray paint. So now it looks like a copper pipe, but is is not. And my lighting problem was solved.

So then I was done!
I had made the upper shelve a little lower, that shelve is for tasters and glasses. The bottom of the cabinet was for the boxes or bottles I'm saving for later.
And I placed a big glass vase there, for all the corks of empty bottles. It is always a good idea to keep a lot of spare corks.

At first, I noticed I had spare room for more bottles. But as the image at the top of this article shows, I'm running out of places to place bottles, tasters and glasses.

So for now, this is my little cabinet of joy. And when I'm sitting in my mancave at night and turn on the lights, I enjoy looking at it, deciding what dram to pour myself, already drawing an extension or new cabinet in my head.