wine glass shelf

This is the result of months of browbeating Kara until she would let me do this. She actually likes the results, and it’s both stylish and functional:

I have seen commercial shelves like this one, which use a wire hanger to suspend the wine glasses. I wanted to build one myself so the design of the shelf would match what we already have in the living room, but I couldn’t find the wire wine glass racks any narrower than 10″ deep. I didn’t want something jutting out that far from the wall, so the only solution was to build it myself.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the tools to bend and shape wire, so I had to do the job with wood. I decided that, although I might like to use a thinner wood than the 3/4″ pine I use for pretty much everything else, the project would be simplified by just using the same material everywhere.
So I sketched out a rough design, featuring these T-shaped racks. I measured the wine and martini glasses we have around the house and decided that I wanted it to hold two red wine glasses deep by 6 wide…building it to hold martini glasses would have required a deeper shelf, and I was really trying to essentially replace the small shelf we had previously had above the “bar” with something similar in size, just with racks on the bottom of it.

I did a little math (that took way longer than it should have) to figure out how much space I needed between the “pillar” of each T to fit the base of the glass, and how wide the gap between each top of the T needed to be to accept the stem of the glass. I decided that I would use glue and finishing nails to give maximum strength to the design, as I didn’t want it to come apart and demolish any glasses later…it’s overengineered enough that you could probably hang wine bottles from the rack and you’d be just fine.

As always, I screwed up a couple of measurements and the cuts didn’t line up exactly. Plus, the boards I was using were just slightly warped. But all things considered, the end result was pretty good. One of the 6 “channels” is only big enough for white wine glasses, because I probably should have just taken 6 glasses and used them to test the spacing before I glued/nailed everything together, but hindsight is 20/20.

Here’s a closer look, where you can see some more detail of how it’s put together:

I like it, Kara likes it, and it’s on the wall. It gives us a lot more space for other stuff, plus I think it fits our decor. And it was fun and educational to build.

Now, one of these days I’m going to have a workshop and a table saw, and maybe then my cuts will start to line up better.

Or I guess I could stop eyeballing things and get out the tape measure.