As many of you know, Mike and I are retired architects and we did a large amount of the build-out of the space ourselves. Not that we had lots of prior experience doing the actual construction, but we had an interest and an eagerness to learn more about the hands-on side of the construction industry. This includes the finish carpentry work in the tasting room. Last week, in preparation for the Grand Opening, we decided to build the shelves behind the bar. This had always been part of the plan but now the time had come to make it happen (three days before the grand opening).

As you can see the back wall was really bare and this left a lot of people wondering what we had planned. The plan was to put in some large wood slab shelves and black iron pipe supports. Because this is a rather large space we needed to scale up the size of the pipe and the wood planks. For the pipe we settled on 1-1/2″ pipe and fittings. For the wood, we decide that 2×10 rough cedar match nicely with the knotty alder used for the rest of the build-out.

The first step of the process was to add blocking for support to the existing wall. So we started by cutting out a 1-2″ high strip from the drywall at location of both the top and bottom supports for the shelves.

We then added 2×12 yellow pine blocking between each stud working from left to right. Once in place this gave the wall considerable strength and rigidity.

Next step was to repair the massive holes in the drywall. Not really hard but it is time consuming. In this case we used 5/8″ firecode drywall. After a couple coats of drywall mud, a little sanding and some paint, it was good as new.

Then came time to install the shelves. This was simply a matter of screwing together all of the pieces of pipe and then using lag bolts to secure the shelves to the newly reinforced wall. We ended up working on it rather late the night before the opening, but we were thrilled with how it turned out.