A Wine Cellar Tour

Around the first of the year, I posted pictures of the wine bottle chandelier we built. 

Which hung alone in this pathetic looking room for a few days...until we painted it Merlot Red.

This room had become the catch-all room for all our extra junk.

It takes a lot of courage for me to post these. How embarrassing.  Can you visualize a wine cellar in this room?

I had a hard time too.

But we went to work cleaning, painting, staining, sanding, and building-out this room hoping that wine cellar vision would become clearer.

Don't worry.  I didn't operate that saw at all. 

While Aaron built the wine racks, I painted and stained.  What a team effort!  We pulled up an old berber carpet.  I envisioned painting the cement floor in a pewter high-gloss enamel, but as it turns out, I don't really know a lot about painting cement floors.  So it turned out looking more like just wet cement.  Which is fine.  It's still an improvement from the old carpet.

We've been working on rearranging all the junk that has been stored in this room since we moved in 2 years ago (almost to the day) and making some sense of all of it.  As we've been putting things in place I couldn't help but notice the eclectic mix of history we have in this room.  Every piece in here has a story.

Let me take you on a tour.

The Green Armoire:
Notice how boring and lifeless the the green armoire looks in the "before" pictures?  Really perks up against the Merlot Red paint!  I rescued that armoire from a dumpster in my condo building when I was single and living in my uptown.  So I guess you could say I went dumpster diving.  I couldn't believe someone was going to trash it! 

I found it sitting by the dumpster and decided to roll it all the way up to my condo and rehab it a bit.  Little cleaning, little paint, little WD-40, and voila!  In fact, I blogged about it the day I hauled it up from the dumpster. That was back in the day when I had a totally different blog and wrote about the adventures of being a single city girl.  Life was different then.  Boy, was it different. 

The Dragon Lamp:

I'm not the only one bringing my pre-marriage history into this room. Try as I might to hide, break, or give-away this stupid thing, it somehow made its way into our wine cellar. Apparently, Aaron saw this at the Renaissance Festival many years ago and decided that he could.not.live.without.this.dragon.lamp.  Now it sits on our new wine racks like a little buddha.

Speaking of Renaissance Festival, Aaron also has his collection of drinking vessels and chalices.  He proudly lined them up and put them on display as soon as we had the wine racks up.  That was a battle worth picking for me. And I won. And you'll notice in the pictures above that they are now on the bottom corner of the wine shelf and not really visible from the front of the room.  It was after that he brought out the dragon lamp.  Can't win 'em all!   

The Poker Table:
Last November, on a very sad day when we sold our family cabin up north, we went to say good-bye and scavenged the place for any hidden treasures or sentimental items.  When nobody rescued this old poker table, I took it.  40 years ago my dad, uncles, and grandfather stayed up late playing cards around this table.  And now it sits in our wine cellar.  Cards, anyone?

The Pub Table:
I bought for Aaron a couple years ago when we were trying to sell his bachelor pad and I needed to stage his kitchen.  He lived in this house with a friend for 7 years.  They had a nice little eat-in kitchen, but never had a kitchen table the whole time they lived there!  Bachelors.

We couldn't leave our wine chandelier just hanging there!  So the pub table now sits below it as our wine tasting table.

The Malt Machine:
Besides my bright green bowling ball with "Ashbags" engraved on it, this nostalgic malt machine is my only other momento from the Aqua Bowl, the bowling alley where I grew up.  I'm not sure if the wine cellar is the best place for it, but it'll do for now.  Wine malts?  Hmmmm....I might be on to something!
Lots of good memories and delicious malts around this old thing.

The Wreath:

Remember when I posted on our grapevine pruning weekend in January and I went crazy and made like 258 grapevine wreaths? 

Well, maybe it was more like seven.  But I spruced up one of them and used it for decor in here.

And in case you are wondering why I only took pictures from one angle in the room, it's because we have a big eye sore in here too.

Nothing like the big ol' plaid hand-me-down couch from mom and dad in your new swanky wine cellar.  We had hoped to keep it in the main area of the basement, but had to move it away from you know who....

I wonder who did that? 

Seriously, one of these days I'll get through a post without posting a dog picture.  In Belle's defense, she doesn't dig couches anymore.  That was back when she was an emotionally disturbed newly adopted puppy. 

The empty magnum wine bottles of Frontenac Port:

Aaron made that port in 2004 and we served it at our wedding last year.

I wasn't  even a glint in his eye and he saved these bottles to serve at his wedding.  He just didn't know who he was going to marry at the time!

The other wine rack:

I gave this to Aaron on our first Christmas together.  Doesn't seem very substantial now, does it?  That was when I was naive and thought a 4-bottle wine bottle holder would be enough for a wine enthusiast.

The Wine:

And lastly, the reason we built all these wine racks afterall.  To store our own wine.  And here, are some of the bottles from our last two batches of wine.