This September we finally upgraded our unused dining room from dumping ground to an actually-functioning wine and whisky room. We’d been discussing this for several years, but now that we are home all the time we finally had the motivation to get things started.

chairs purchased by Leandra three years ago for “motivation”

ugh

First up was getting everything out the room, then painting walls, as this room still had the original butter yellow wall color. Leandra accomplished this over Labor Day:

Next, we moved the wine fridge 90 degrees and into a corner where it could anchor one side of our wall of cabinets.

The cabinets came from IKEA, a 2-hour drive from us, and since they didn’t have curbside pick-up active (and shipping was pricey) we waited until there were plenty of boxes in stock before trekking to Charlotte. Over the course of three nights we glued and screwed all the cabinets together.

Everything fit as expected. Whew!

Next we anchored the top cabinets to the walls, cut out a hole for the electrical outlet, and manually re-drilled some new shelf height holes on one of the cabinets so we could store more glassware.

We are pretty happy with the final product – things are organized and put away, and our whisky went from hiding under a towel to well-displayed.