a pretty little wine rack for under $40!

we've needed a wine storage solution for the house for awhile now. below is what it

was

. a non-functioning 12 bottle wine fridge, a six bottle wine rack stacked on top of it, and a bunch of other bottles just sitting on the floor. not very pretty or organize, or consistent. i've done quite a bit of research on wine fridges, and all that's really told me is that they are often expensive (for the size i want) as well as finicky. no fridge has consistently good reviews - always about a quarter of the reviews say they don't work out of the box. i take all that with a grain of salt, but nothing has made me confident enough to put the money down for it.

a few weekends ago, we stumbled upon the Omar Bottle Shelf from IKEA (only $30! to hold 24 bottles!). the only thing i didn't like about it is that it's so CHROME. which, you know, works great for storage shelves in the basement, but not so much for the corner of the dining room! so we threw in a bottle of Rust-Oleum's Champagne Mist metallic spray paint from home depot and ended up with a pretty little wine rack that holds a decent number of wines

plus, i think it really cleans up the space nicely. we still don't have a good solution for the growlers, but at least we no longer have wine bottles stored three different ways in our dining room (not including the whites in the actual fridge, of course). and it's much easier to see look at all the bottles now too, which makes picking one less of a chore, which means we've been more likely to have some wine with dinner.

diy: stocking holders.

we bought personalized velvet stockings (don't you just love the little elf sock one for sanford?!), and needed some way of putting them on the mantle place. so with a piece of spare firewood, some hooks and spray paint, we made our own! though, there is certainly still some work to do on them - anything heavier than the stocking itself would yank them right off at the moment.

james was super stoked to be able to finally use the miter saw we bought over the summer. it had been purchased with plans to build a fancy planter box, but unforeseen circumstances put those plans on hold.

after drilling pilot holes into the little cut logs, we screwed in some screw hooks we'd picked up.

before spray painting, i taped around the screw-in point and then wrapped with more paper and tape, just to be safe!

the rust-oleum in champagne mist was so pretty that i also busted out about half the pinecones we'd bought to decorate with and gave them a gentle spritzing too!

since we can't put anything in the stockings yet, we'll need to do some more work to them so that they can be weighted down from behind the holder itself.

the star and garland-ing was from michaels, and the stockings were from pottery barn.