7 Bottle Wine Stave Wine Rack

I bought this wine barrel off of Craigslist for $35. Now I write the following with all seriousness. If you find it funny, it's not. Stop laughing because it's seriously serious. Seriously.

Craigslist is already a pretty sketchy way to do business. You have no idea what kind of people you might be dealing with on either side of the transaction. When you go to pick up your article, do not, under any circumstances, lock your keys in your truck on their property about a quarter mile behind their house. It looks real, real bad to sit there for 35 mins after the transaction has been completed and they've returned to their house. Unfortunately for me, it was about 35 degrees, with gusting winds. And guess who didn't bring a coat? This required me to hunker down behind my truck to try and stay out of the wind, which I imagine looks exactly like hiding a body. Lucky for me, cops weren't called and my beautiful fiance drove all the way out to Eagle to bring her brain dead future husband his spare key.

Today I built a wine rack using the staves. My original design was to use the two staves side-by-side, but I couldn't get it to look right. It just looked like I nailed some wood together. So I took to the internet and tried to get some ideas. Thanks to Google, I have discovered that I don't have a single original idea in my head. If I think of it, someone else has already built it... better. Vegan zombies? Graaaaiiiiinnns. There was already a shirt. Shower wall hair art? Three blogs. Take a printer apart? Well, that one does seem to be original. Anyway, I killed two birds with this project. 1) I needed something nicer than a cardboard box to display the reception wine. And 2) I needed a groomsman gift for my best man (sorry to ruin the surprise, buddy).





I selected the two widest staves from the barrel then scrubbed them to remove dirt and dead bugs. I took a scrap stave left over from some candle holders I built, and cut it into half-inch dividers to keep the wine bottles from rolling around.





Then, I measured, marked, and glued the spacers in place. Since the wood is rough cut and wine bottles are heavy I didn't expect that glue would hold up if a bottle hit one of the spacers with any force. So I screwed the spacers from the back as well. Normally I would screw and glue at the same time, but since the staves are curved, and I suck at circle math, I glued the spacers before putting in screws. I wanted to make sure that the angle for the pilot hole was perfect.




Here's the finished product. I like that you can see the lines in the bottom stave where the bands protected the oak from weathering. And the natural wine stain adds a very cool touch.










I am aware that several of the bottles on this rack are empty. That's because I'm no wine snob. I don't have a cellar full of wine. I have a trash can full of empty wine bottles.