Monday was time for the mouse to get on with project number one. Since we moved into this house 20 years ago, our wine store has hitherto successfully been made up of good ol’ cardboard wine boxes on their sides and stacked, one on top of the other, five high in the under-stairs cupboard. Admittedly, there were a few overflow storage devices on a shelf; I mean, five cases is not enough for a pair of dedicated wine-lake assault members now, is it? Every now and then one of the box’s sides would become a little weakened and start sagging (no comments about reflecting the owner, please) and I would replace it but, all in all, it worked well. I guess “bins ain’t what they used to be”, however, because, a month or so ago, my beloved cardboard cellar suffered a collapse which I was unable to rectify. Time for a better solution.
Some dedicated research had found Argos selling pine 7 x 8 bottle wine racks for £20 apiece. I thought I might devise a way of stacking them such that they’d fit in the under-stairs cupboard, one way round or the other. So I’d bought two and found they were packed in boxes very much smaller than I’d expected. God bless self-assembly.
Monday was spent emptying the cupboard having first removed the door to facilitate unencumbered access, ripping out the old shelf and its supports which had been cut-nailed to the wall, and filling the resultant holes in preparation for a lick of paint. Judicious use of the tape measure revealed that, were I to remove the architrave from inside the cupboard door frame, I could actually get the wine racks in on their 8-bottle side, saving some height which I might put to good use. (Who on Earth needs architrave on the inside of an under-stairs cupboard door frame, anyway?) Off it came. More filling ensued. To quote the irritating football commentators, “result!”
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