New Dining Room Wine Storage!

So, we bought a wine storage system for our dining room! It was a solution to a bunch of problems: (1) our current system of storing wine in the pantry wasn't providing enough room, which led to wine bottles falling out and breaking onto/all over the kitchen floor; (2) there was an empty space on that wall in the dining room, and it needed something fairly shallow that wouldn't be too close to the dining chairs, and (3) we wanted an excuse to buy lots of wine on our upcoming Napa Valley trip. 

Luckily, our brand new wine storage cube solves all of those problems! 

We ordered it from Wine Racks America, which was a bit scary because I hadn't actually seen the stain color in person before ordering. But it all worked out just fine - see how the color is pretty much exactly the same as the dining room table & chairs?

It came in pieces with some assembly required, which wouldn't have been a big deal if the directions had actually applied to the configuration we purchased. 

Pieces . . .

Ours is the "Solid Diamond Cube" . . .

Unfortunately, the directions didn't apply to the Solid Diamond Cube!

Again, this is another time when having an engineer for a husband comes in handy. He figured it all out, and pretty soon we were able to empty out our overflowing pantry wine stash into our new wine storage cube! 
It's made of solid pine with a mahogany stain, so it's nice and sturdy (no more worries about crashing wine bottles!). 

For now, I put the Crate & Barrel tealight holders from the San Marcos outlets on top of it, but it's pretty likely that something else will end up there. I'll revisit that once I get curtains on the windows and figure out what to hang on the wall above the wine rack. 

I love the simplicity of it. I feel like I struggle with the dining room because it's constantly teetering on the line of being more formal than I want it (we bought a fairly formal set of table/chairs, and the hand-me-down console table from my parents is definitely more formal/traditional than we would've picked), so it's nice to add something simple with clean lines to the room. 

We looked at some other options for wine storage from stores like Ballard Designs and Pottery Barn, but we really needed something that wasn't too deep (so it didn't end up too close to the backs of the chairs), and this wine rack was by far the shallowest of anything we looked at.

See? Plenty of room for the chairs to pull out. 

I'm so happy to finally have something on that wall. I think the room feels a lot more balanced now. 

Anyone else having wine storage issues? I advise you to get them under control before a nice bottle of cabernet falls to your tile floor and causes you to spend days getting the red stains out of your grout and your new jeans. 
Now we just have to get lots of wine in Napa to fill him up! We can hold 92 bottles in there!