#155- The Wine Bar

This weird project house of ours came with one rare feature, a built in china cabinet in the middle of our Family Room.  Try to control your jealousy and hang with me... This golden oak, 80's wonder  is located right at the bottom of the steps as you entire the Family Room.  The first thing you see.

It's built into a sofit above it, and sports a huge 3' x 4' mirror.  For the time being we threw some glasswear and wine bottles on it and called it a day. 

From the start we knew something had to be done to this piece so it didn't give off that, "Dude, why's there a china cabinet in your Family Room?" vibe.  The problem was we couldn't just tear it out, as it would look really strange to have the empty sofit hanging from the wall.  Plus, since there isn't much room for storage upstairs in the Dining Room, it actually helps to have a place for all this glasswear downstairs.  So after a little brainstorming we decided china hutch = weird, wine bar = perfect fit.

Step one of project #155 on The List was to remove the scallop from the top of the center piece.  It always amazes me what a difference it makes to remove a scallop from cabinets or furniture.  And it takes all of 30 seconds.

Next it was time to take out the mirror in the back, which was held in by just a few trim pieces.  It came out pretty easily, and left this hot mess behind.

 

Then we cleaned out all the cabinets and got our paint on.   To make this piece different and more like a piece of furniture rather than a built in, we went with a deep, charcoal gray on the outside, and painted just the insides of the glass cabinets with a bright white for contrast.

 

Speaking of those glass front cabinets, they were actually filled with plexiglass, and someone along the way did a pretty quick job in cutting the plexi, and all of the pieces weren't square.  See the top right corner in the photo below?  The plexi doesn't even fit into the cabinet back.

The result was that the cabinet doors were warped to fit the glass and wouldn't close.  I had to tear them all apart and rebuild them to make them square again.  Then I trimmed down the plexi to make it fit.  I put a line of tape on the plexi so it wouldn't crack or chip, and then ran it through my table saw.

Once the cabinet doors were rebuilt I worked to install a couple of puck lights in the top of each built in cabinet.  They tucked in nicely at the top.

I was able to run them to a single tap switch/dimmer which you can see on the wall to right of the cabinet.  I love how it's that sleek, clean white circle. 

Which after all that, left us with this:

 

Try to ignore that big, ugly space in the middle for a moment and enjoy with me the awesome new charcoal color and the bright white insides lit with the beautiful lighting.   Okay, it's hard to ignore the gaping mess, but that's a whole other post.  Next week I'll show you my little plan for that space.  In the mean time- cheers to painted golden oak and progress!