My homemade bar shelves

by Andrew

2005-05-26 11:14:43

A better title for this project might be "Punk Rock Alcohol(ic) Carpentry." In any event consider this as less of a how-to guide and more of a why-not story.

First off let's get one thing straight, I'm not an alcoholic, they go to meetings. I'm a lush, my roommates are drunks and we're all comfortable with that. We have a bar in our living room which unfortunately you can only get behind by going though four doors. This makes storing bottles behind the bar rather impractical and we ended up piling bottles on top of the bar. What could we do? Curtail our drinking? Move the bar? Never! At some point I got the bright idea to build shelves for the bottles on hinges so we could still swing them open and bartend (if we wanted). This being one of my crazy projects I decided to do it as cheep as possible. Most of the wood came from my basement, the hinges we had on hand. Almost all of the screws were ex-drywall from a warehouse. We only paid for the paint and fabric. The result (click for a larger view):

closed and ...

open

Well, ok they're crummy photos, but you get the idea. The shelves are actually painted matt satin black and look much better than any of the photographs I've managed to take. The top shelf is backed with white crush stretch velvet and the lower shelves with a heavier deep red velvet. Cheers. (02/26/05)

Added 02/28/05

Today we put a door and lock on the top shelf to guard our more expencive bottles from our drunken friends and selves. The design was a heavy compromise, I would have preferred a fleur-de-lis. A skull and cross bones and a design with bunnies were all discussed. Seeing as how I did almost all of the actual work, I should have stuck to my guns. [EDIT: I've been using this logo for 5 years now and I can say that I was definitely smoking crack when I tried to argue against the sickle and martini glass. Also, just to be clear, Owen proposed the idea, I made the final design (27/04/2010)] The only problem is that for the time being we only have one key. Click the image for a larger view.



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