Points of interest...to me: Wine storage

I have two wine problems: I like wine too much, and now I don't have a good place to safely store it. To combat the second half of my wine problems I have built wine storage into parts of the unfinished crawl-space below my house. There's an innocuous looking door in the finished part of the basement, that opens onto plastic covered dirt.

Here's the project a few hours in -- I have pulled back the black plastic that covers the uneven ground, only to find a giant lump of concrete that I have had to break up by hand in order to create a level space on which I can build a platform. Breaking up the concrete actually gave me tennis elbow for about 2 months, and slowed my squash game considerably. I recommend renting a rotary hammer for this, but I wasn't smart enough to do that.

My intent is to build a rectangular platform just inside the door on which I can stand. Then I'll attach shelves to the wall on the left, and suspend them from the wall and joists above. The platform will support me and no wine -- it's just going to be wood on cinder blocks on the clay, and will not support a continuous load of wine.

I was lucky that there was already a light fixture in the space, and I broke out some track lights dating from my college days (circa 1990) that I still have. They don't add aesthetically, but the do make it brighter.

I have the platform in place, and I've screwed some lovely old plywood to the wall. I got all this lumber for free on Craigslist -- someone had cabinets in their basement and wanted them gone. I have used this supply of great plywood to build this wall and shelves, as well as my child's elevated bed. By the way, the bed frame is attached to the wall with a French cleat, and uses Ikea mattress supports and an Ikea mattress.

I don't have a photo of the bare shelves installed, but I created a set of four shelves 16" deep and 60" wide. The back of each shelf is screwed to a cleat that is screwed into the 3/4" plywood on the wall. The left side has the same treatment (on the near wall), and the right corner is screwed to a 2x4 suspended from a joist above. The front of each shelf is attached to a metal strap that is similarly screwed to the joist above. The purpose of all of this suspension is to ensure the weight of the wine rests on the joists above and the wall behind, not on the wood platform on cinder blocks resting on clay.

For about a year I used the shelves as-is by placing boxes of wine directly on the shelves. However, that wasn't a great success for me: many boxes were partially empty, I couldn't see how much of any given wine was left, if I mixed bottles in boxes it was hard to find a wine, and the bottle-density just wasn't great (which becomes a problem when you just buy more wine). So I decided to switch from "boxes on shelves" to grid-based storage that I make out of wood.

As I started down that path I soon realized that wine bottles vary in size. I did some research and found this link that showed 'standard' bottle sizes:

I chose 3.5" x 3.5" to hold most all bottles (it won't hold magnums or sparkling wine bottles). I have had some success using a thin (7/32") luan-based underlayment from Home Depot that is cheap -- I can get a 4x8 sheet for $12. Thinking of using that material, I drew up the following idea and then developed a cut-sheet based on a 9"-deep rack.

Note that the 4'x8' plywood supplies all parts EXCEPT the little supports running in the corner of each shelf. I did some math and figured that at 9" long and with each rack needing 80 of them, each rack would need 60 feet of that material...and that was going to be expensive. In the end I went cheap and instead of using lumber for these supports I used a box of 1000 Popsicle sticks from Michaels ($5 after coupon). As luck would have it, each Popsicle stick is 4 1/2" long, so two sticks are perfect for my 9" deep rack.

I cut the 4'x8' plywood into 8' long 9" wide strips, and chopped pieces accordingly: