Our DIY Wine Cellar with Carrara Marble!

Hi Barbies!

I hope you're doing well. I'm late to tell you this, but happy 2015! For those of you who made resolutions, I hope you've been able to keep them so far and that they're going well.

I wanted to take a minute to share hubby's latest -- and possibly greatest -- project. As you all know, we have an empty room off of our formal living room that was intended as a wine cellar. We didn't have the builder build the shelving because their quoted price was high (it ended up being roughly 30 times the cost of what hubby spent to build it). Despite being in our house for almost two years now, its never been completed because its never been a priority. Fortunately, thanks to some persuasive spousal lobbying on my part and some unexpected free time on his, he did it (!!) and in my opinion its his best work yet!!

He built the wooden frame on the bottom, then built the three top pieces (2 full sized and 1 half sized for the middle) that he eventually mounted on top of the bottom frame. The top pieces were very, VERY time consuming considering he had to cut so many thin pieces to hold the bottles. He then stained the entire thing in this grayish stain I picked out, which is Minwax Slate. I wanted gray because I knew I wanted carrara marble as the countertop, which has a lot of grain veins.

We chose a stain instead of a paint to highlight the wood - a really beautiful cherry poplar. After staining it all, he added trim all around it to make it look like one piece. He also installed the carrara marble himself - which we bought as a remnant very inexpensively. I had to help him carry it into the house - boy was that thing deceptively heavy! Last, we selected a gray and white tile that he installed as a backsplash - he even cut the tiles himself by borrowing a friend's tile cutter. Installing the tile took under an hour - super easy for him.

Oh, and as an added bonus, he ran electricity through the piece so that we could have accent lights in it... he even made his own LED tube lighting (which was probably the most time consuming part of the entire project aside from cutting the wood). Isn't hubby so talented??