The Wine Bottle Chandelier

Every month I get the Pottery Barn catalogue.  I love everything in there.  Everything.  Love it.
Now that our house is pretty much finally settled with furniture and decor, I've been able to resist the temptation to buy anything, so I just look at it every month for ideas, design, paint, organization, and furniture for the next time I get the bug to change things up a bit. 

The past several months, one particular item has been tantalizing me.  A wine bottle chandelier.  But I have shied away from the price.  Four hundred bucks.  And the fact that we don't really need a new chandelier. But I just think this is so cool, and we're wine people...so we should have a wine bottle chandelier, right?

I showed Aaron this picture in the PB catalogue, and before I knew it, he was pulling out supplies for us to make one ourselves.  I mean, look at the main materials here...a bunch of wine bottles, which, hello? we have like hundreds of around here!  We thought this would be fun in our soon-to-be wine cellar, another project we are just getting started on in the basement.  Here is a "before" picture.  And this was even after I had already moved out a bunch of junk!

Can't you just visualize the potential in this mess of a room?!  Think swanky...dark walls with mood lighting, and wine bottles floor to ceiling in rustic wine racks. Can you see it? 

But, back to the chandelier.  We went to the whiteboard and came up with our own wine bottle chandelier design, making ours rectangular and adding in some wine glass holders, and found 8 matchng bottles from our collection of recycled bottles, brought out the drill, the tape measure, bought some thingies for wiring it, cut some plywood, slapped on some stain, and the result was this...

And in case you are wondering, we painted the room too.  Merlot Red.  The paint name only had a slight influence on our choosing the color.  It was between that and Moroccan Spice and when we couldn't decide, Merlot Red won out, even though neither of us think it is really "Merlot" in color.  But we like how it turned out.  Now, to finish getting the rest of the room set-up.  Here is a sneak peak of the next project in transforming this room into a swanky wine cellar. 

The wine racks, which are, sort of an essential part to a wine cellar.  So far my only contribution to this project has been helping to carry in the 8 huge and heavy planks of plywood.  Really heavy.  Pretty soon, I'll hear Aaron calling...I enter back in once it is constructed for sanding and staining.