Sneak Peak: The Beginnings of a Built-In Basement Wine Rack
Facebook Marketplace strikes again!! What I like best about re-using and re-purposing furniture is that I don’t feel bad if it doesn’t work or I hate it. Plus, if it goes up and I don’t like it, I don’t feel guilty trying whatever I can come up with to make it work! As soon as I saw these modular wine racks, I had visions of wine cellars dancing in my head!
It’s a Sweet Old Basement
I have loved this basement since the moment I stepped into it— and it’s really not much to speak of! It’s the original basement of the original house, so around 130 years old at this point. The walls are brick or stone, the floors are beautiful brick herringbone (covered in rust), there’s a giant geothermal unit in the middle, water treatment in one corner, and an old fiberglass semi-creepy stand up shower in another.
I’ll have to take some pictures and it’s definitely not the prettiest room of the house, but there’s so much old school COOL in here!
We use the basement mainly for storage: holiday decorations, pictures and frames not being used, and homeschool books. So there are shelves and storage tubs galore.
A Wine Room??
And then I saw an ad on FB Marketplace for wine racks. They weren’t assembled and I knew they looked pretty rough, but I couldn’t help but dream about placing them in our cool old basement. Luckily Chad approved!!
I went and picked them up for around $80, I think. I figured that even if I had to rebuild everything else, the scalloped pieces were worth the price for saving me the time. I got them home after dark, no one else was terribly impressed, and they went straight to the basement sitting on end to wait for the time they would be assembled again.
So they waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Until today! I knew there were some canvases that I had stored in the basement that may have gotten a little wet so I wanted to check them out. I decided to take 30-60 minutes out of whatever we were doing this weekend and coerce the girls into helping to organize the basement.
Organizing the Clutter
The canvases and a larger framed print that I’m contemplating painting over went upstairs right away, and then we went through any boxes that weren’t identified as holiday boxes. Over the last four years, there have apparently been times I’ve gotten fed up with clutter, loaded it into a box, and moved it into the basement. Sounds silly, right? Oh well. It happened and now it has been rectified. Ha!
My mother-in-law gave me a heavy duty shelf for Christmas last year, so we assembled it and used it for the extra homeschool & co-op texts that are in storage. We move all of the holiday decor to a specific shelf and everything extra to it’s own area.
Then it was time!! The only things without a home were the wine rack pieces. I scanned the basement for their new home, and while I love my herringbone brick floors, they are dirty and a bit uneven, and I know that there are times that the basement gets damp, so I need to be strategic.
A Strong Option for a Wine Cellar
I considered several options but ultimately realized a partial wall with a built up shelf could be the perfect solution. The wine rack pieces are not heavy, so I gave it a shot, and I love them!! Some of the pieces had lost the back of the box, but I just wanted to see how they fit and what they looked like.
And when it comes down to it, I think I like it better when I can see the stone wall behind the rack. What do you think?? Let me know! (And don’t mind the hooters guarding the wine!! )
