A better title for this project might be "Punk Rock Alcohol(ic) Carpentry." In any event consider this as less of a how-to guide and more of a why-not story.

First off let's get one thing striaght, I'm not an alcoholic, they go to meetings. I'm a lush, my roommates are drunks and we're all comfortable with that. We have a bar in our living room which unfortunately you can only get behind by going though four doors. This makes storing bottles behind the bar rather impracticle and we ended up piling bottles on top of the bar. What could we do? Curtail our drinking? Move the bar? Never! At some point I got the bright idea to build shelves for the bottles on hinges so we could still swing them open and bartend (if we wanted). This being one of my crazy projects I decided to do it as cheep as possible. Most of the wood came from my basement, the hinges we had on hand. Almost all of the screws were ex-drywall from a warehouse. We only paid for the paint and fabric. The result (click for a larger view):

closed and ...

open

Well, ok they're crummy photos, but you get the idea. The shelves are actually painted matt satin black and look much better than any of the photographs I've managed to take. The top shelf is backed with white crush stretch velvet and the lower shelves with a heavier deep red velvet. Cheers. (02/26/05)