Closet Whiskey Dry Bar

I know what you’re thinking, “what does that title say? A whiskey bar in a closet?” Well it’s actually a very clever idea. This customer is a repeat customer for me, about a year ago I remodeled their pantry to allow for stronger and more storage for their whiskey collection. Now they’ve outgrown that space and needed another space to store their whiskey. They have a bonus room that they wanted to utilize as a “tasting room” and needed a dry bar to store the extra whiskey and pour drinks. And so the idea was born. 

The design was somewhat basic yet had the twist of needing to make cabinets that went into the closet and didn’t sacrifice all of that space. The plan was to make 2 cabinets that would fill the space in the sides of the closet and then a cabinet in the middle with drawers. The construction for these cabinets is pretty basic in the sense that none of the sides will be visible so simple glue and screws will work just fine. I made the cabinets somewhat standard,except the opening was in a different spot and would allow the opening to face the opening of the closet. 

The top of the piece and the shelf were made from soft maple and had a thick stain applied. The process was just like my previous builds in that I purchased the lumber from my distributor S3S, and just needed to clean up one edge, then take just a thin layer off the top and bottom. I glued the piece up a little larger than the overall closet space and cut the piece on site. A trick I learned from other wood workers is to create a template from either plywood or mdf so that your angles and scribing is much easier to handle. 

The shelf with the LED lights is standard for me at this point because I’ve done so many of them. The basics of it are to use 2x2s of the main part of the structure, ½” plywood for the top and bottom, and maple lumber for the face. The 1/2 “ plywood gets a rabbet along the side that will be up against the wall and I leave a space to run the wires through. If you want to see how I put together my doors I have an article on that here: https://youtu.be/xCehyMitqk4

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