Not quite the racking I had in mind

[in case you didn't get the pun]

I will finish the Slovenia post, but for now, I wanted to tout my achievement of assembling this new wine rack. I purchased and carried it home from Argos on Saturday, knowing that it was 'assembly required.' I failed, however, to anticipate how much construction was really required. This has 166 individual pieces, simply to hold together 56 bottles of wine.

I lay out all the pieces on the front sidewalk and after about 45 minutes was only halfway through, having finished lining up the front supports and hammering in each wood plank's grooves into the frame. Now for the real work...63 nails and nearly 20 different support beams to align across the back to stabilize the structure. Time for a break....one large can of Red Stripe Jamaican Lager later and I had renewed energy. In the meantime, several people walked by and either asked what I was doing or as one woman commented, "I assembled one of those once..." and her voice trailed off as if she were reliving wartime repressed memories. Apparently she had done something wrong, and had to take it apart and start over again. Of course, she couldn't remember what the mistake was, but she encouraged me "I'm sure you are doing it right." At that point, I actually wasn't.

In the end, after 2 hours, 63 nails, and a thumb that was only hit twice, I did indeed have a wine rack. It fits perfectly in the lower half of one of my closets in the bedroom, which is the ideal place for it because it's 1. dark, 2. out of the way, and 3. the coolest part of the house (upstairs gets much too hot when we cook and there is always a marked difference in temperature between the floors even when the weather is mild). Of course, the rack is almost full with the wine I already had, but I'm not ready to assemble another one quite yet.