We made significant headway at our Wednesday Wines shop yesterday. I'm going to hold off for a few days with the pictures of that project, but wanted to show the latest piece that we've built and installed. I did something different on this piece, I left the wood unfinished. Usually I love to plane down the old wood and reveal the beautiful grain beneath, but for some reason this wood wanted to be left alone. You can see how seriously tight the grain pattern is in to photo above. There are a hundred years of tree growth going across that one two by eight!
There is the finished shelf unit to the left. Kathy wanted to have that crossing pattern to hold bottles horizontally under the display shelves and of course whatever Kathy wants Kathy gets! I am NOT good at geometry, so the equilateral triangles didn't turn out quite the way I wanted them to. I tried to lay out bottles on a piece of plywood and then convert that to the project, but came up a few inches short somehow on the actual layout. So, each triangle holds five bottles of wine instead of six. (This result would not surprise my high school geometry teacher in the lease.) It works out OK, because we order a lot of wine by six bottle increments, so one display and five below works out just fine. (I can rationalize just about anything!)
This little shelf looks so simple, but there are a lot of angles involved--a lot of compound cuts that are difficult to get right--especially if you are geometrically challenged, as I seem to be.
The smaller shelves on top will fit in right behind an electrical panel that can't be covered up. On the photo below you can see how I had to join together two boards to get the right depth for
the upper, (skinnier) boards. Those longer boards had a re-sawn edge, so I applied a piece of rough board over them when I put the shelf together. Again there are clamps involved. It was kind of nice, because Friday I got these pieces ready to put together, clamped them up and then left for the fundraiser for Lutheran Community Services. Saturday morning at first light I was back in the shop putting this unit together. Once it was finished we brought it over to the shop, installed it and the bar, (uh, I mean counter) and totally re-arranged the shop. One of the most fun aspects of the job was having to go under the shop and re-route the line for the credit card machine. I got the old one in place, so I made Garry go under and place this one! You have to crawl on the dirt, under a beam that is only 14 inches off the ground. It was a very tight fit for me, and when Garry came out he expressed surprise that I'd been able to do it (he's a skinny guy.) I don't usually usually get claustrophobic, but crawling under that beam and having to expel my breath to fit under it, about did me in. For lunch we broke off work and went over to Community Plate. It was a great lunch, and the staff didn't even look at us funny when we showed up in extremely dirty clothing and generally disheveled appearance.
We got the shop pretty much put together around five and then we walked over to the Peterson's house for pizza night. A very productive and fun day. Come over to Wednesday Wines this Thursday night for our grand re-opening celebration. You can see all of the changes we've made, and I might even have the new light fixture ready and in place by then! (After all, that's what Kathy wants.)