Me and my father in law spent some time building a winecabinet in the basement of our house.

Introduction

We have a small room (more like a large cabinet) for dark/cold storage of food (veggies, tin cans and such) and beverages. I also keep some beer and wine in there. However the space was not very well utilized for the the wine storage so I had this plan of remodelling it for a while.

<Note: Sorry for the weird scaling, click a single image to have a proper look at it.

Idea

Searching the internet for a ideas I came upon the site https://www.spiralcellars.co.uk/ In the gallery they have a lot of various options. As our storage room is very small - only 110cm wide there isn’t enough space to accomodate something fancy. Also I found the price range a bit above my budget. But I found an idea for a cabinet that would fit given some modifications.

Doing a bit of measurement reverse engineering this cabinet seems to be around 130cm wide. Since my maximum width is 110cm this is clearly a no go. But I liked the design and perhaps there was something to do about it.

Measuring a couple of bottles I found that there are essentially two types of bottles.

• Regular wine bottles, around 8cm in diameter
• Thick bottles and/or Champagne, around 8.5-9cm in diameter

Bottles are also around 20-25cm height, seems there is a bit more freedom here. Adding it all together I realized that I might be able to pull off a scaled down version of the cabinet.

Solution

As I am a computer geek I am pretty useless with hammer and nail (i.e I’m no carpenter) but I do know a few bits and pieces about preparation and planning. I realized that I couldn’t build the whole cabint on my own. As I wanted drawers for the bottom part. However, IKEA kitchencabinets come in various depths and width. There is a bottom cabinet measuring 30cm deep and 80cm wide. I decided to use it as a starting point. This would leave me with 30cm left, which is 15 on each side. Enough to have 2 drawers for bottles as well (like on the idea pictures - but there are two on each side). Given that each drawer is around 30mm per side wall (two walls per drawer) plus the 10cm as space for each bottle. This would fit nicely. I was indeed possible to make the bottom part with small modifications to a couple of IKEA base modules.

The top part was a bit more tricky to get right - measurement wise. I really wanted the cross section in the middle as it gives a cool look to the cabinet. Looking at the picture there are 4 bottles + some extra space. I gathererd they have probably used around 10cm per bottle as a measurement. Making the inner width of the cross section around 82cm (wall in the middle). Measuring in it all up I came to the conclusion that when titled the width of the cross section would be a tiny bit more than 84cm. Slightly larger than the IKEA cabinet.

At first I thought it might not cut it but I did have some slack on the IKEA cabinet and if I would be able to sand off a couple of mm on each side of the cross section this might work.

Going back and forth I came up with this drawing.

While it looks quite promoising there is a pretty big flaw with it - wall width is not accounted for.. Given the tight fit the and the fact the I need four walls to hold the construction it adds up to 4 cm. Basically I was stuck with this: 2+10+2+84+2+10+2 = 112 and that wouldn’t work. I had a hard limit on 110cm, plus I needed SOME margin. At the end I shaved off the mm’s like this: 2+9.5+2+82+2+9.5+2 = 109 Leaving 5mm on each side to fit the cabinet into the 110cm space. The walls are actually 19mm thick and not 20mm which means I have a couple of extra mm as well.

The side drawers of the cabinet holds the bottles with a 20x20mm square rod cut in 25 cm length leaving 5cm in the opening so not to distract the cabinet design that much. I have spaced them evenly apart. The lower part of the cabinet has around 11cm per bottle and the upper part has 12cm per bottle. That was the best compromise I could do.