Wine Cellar

This project was about efficient use of space more than anything else. Calling the end result a wine cellar is really an exaggeration. We live in a small space and need to make use of every bit of storage that we can. There is an awkward closet off the garage that has the water main and sewer plumbing so it needs to be accessible but it’s tucked under the stairs so it’s not terribly useful for storage. I couldn’t put any sort of shelving in front of the water shutoff valve so I was left with limited options. I decided that a wall-mounted wine rack would be perfect as it would be out of the way of the plumbing and still easily usable.

I would love to take credit for this idea but I had found it previously somewhere on the internet. A double rail towel bar (Brogrund, $9.99 from IKEA) works perfectly to hold a pair of bottles, looks great, and was easy to adjust to the exact spacing I wanted.

The utility closet after the first coat of primer.

Pre-drilling the mounting holes for the towel bars in plywood. The wall studs just didn't line up with my mounting locations and I didn't ever want the risk of having a shelf pull out of the drywall.

Wait a second, how is that going to clear the drain pipe? And even if it does, there is no way to fit bottles on it.

Sure enough, that top row has to go.

Much better clearance with the top row removed. Testing the first few rows with both 750mL and 1.5L bottles.

Twelve rows of bottles plus space underneath for boxes. Moving that original top row to the bottom of the rack was the right call.

Kitty testing the LED light strip prior to installation. I went with a standard 2-meter warm white 5v strip so that I could run it off batteries.

I used a magnetic reed switch mounted on the door to turn the LED strip on and off. The closet is rarely open for more than a minute at a time so running the lighting off batteries isn't a problem.

I mounted a D-cell battery pack above the door and simply stapled the LED strip into the door frame. The strip had a protective clear rubber coating over the front so I wasn't at risk of shorting it out. The lighting was a huge improvement and really helped change it from feeling like a utility closet to a wine cellar.

To adjust the light level I was going to build a circuit but found these handy PWM controllers for less than $10 on Amazon. They take anywhere from 1.8 to 12v and switch at around 25kHz so there is no issue with visible flickering.

I had some issues with the magnetic reed switch sticking because my original design was lazy and I was running it well above the 50mA specified current level. The good news is that I was able to stick a transistor in the circuit to handle the LED current and everything has been fine since then.