Lighted Booze Bottle Shelf
I’ve had some requests to explain how I made the lighted bottle shelves that are behind my bar in the lounge .
I didn’t take in-progress photos, but here are a couple of the finished shelves hanging on the wall behind the bar. The shelves are lighted in all the photos below, some photos are just using a flash.
I started out by putting stud bracing in the wall behind the bar. This would allow me to hang the shelves directly into the wall and not have to worry about hitting the vertical studs.
You can see the braces in the wall to the upper left of the fridge:
The shelves themselves are just 2×10’s with the outside corners rounded off so as not to cause any injuries.
We cut a strip out of the back of the shelf to give ample room to hide the light wires.
Holes are drilled through the shelf big enough to allow you to shove the C8 size Christmas lights up through the bottom of the shelf, leaving the wiring hanging below.
There is a strip wedge of wood screwed and glued under the main shelf to hide all the wires that go to the Christmas lights. This wood also gives a little more surface area to the back of the shelf and provides some angular support.
The shelves are then screwed to the bracing studs through the drywall.
The lighted part was a bit more ingenious and came out of the noggin’ of my dear ol’ dad.
We took a piece of 3/8" plexi and cut it to the size of the shelf. Then buff the outer edge of the plexi to make it opaque.
The back of the plexi was cut with big "slots" that were big enough to allow room for the Christmas light bulbs. Slide the plexiglass on the shelf and the bulbs should all fit into the slots. The bulbs should also be just high enough out of the shelf that the bottom of the bulb is actually shining on the edge of the plexi. This creates a sort of fiber optic effect where the light from the bulb goes into the plexiglass and causes the outer opaque edge of the plexi to glow. If you don’t buff out the edge, you don’t get that glow, since the light is actually being reflected off the roughed up edge.
Screw down the plexiglass in the back (make sure to use pilot holes) so the shelf doesn’t move around when you are sliding bottles on/off it.
The back light diffuser is just a long, thin strip of plexi that has been buffed to give it that opaque glowing look.
You could screw that down to the shelf or to the back wall or whatever, just so it doesn’t tip over.
Once we had all that done, we got to the fun part: loading up the shelves with booze.
And after that is the even more fun part: drinking the booze.