As I write this, it is approximately 7:15 and I have been awake since 3:27. My kiddo woke me up, and I am always happy to wake up if she needs me, well, not happy, but you know what I mean. But then I couldn’t go back to sleep. I distracted myself from fretting about, well, you know, everything, by focusing on how hot it’s going to get here in the next few days and how I can avoid using my oven. Then, at four-ish, I decided it was time to stop pretending I was going to go back to sleep and I collected the kitten and watched an episode of Psych. Then I fed the kitten and started my tea and opened some of the boxes that arrived yesterday (two of the board games from my gift ideas list, one cat grass kit). Then I had to rescue the kitten from a piece of tape that had, presumably, escaped from one of the boxes and affixed itself cruelly to his undercarriage. Which is when I discovered that he… well, he needed a bath.

So to recap: It is 7:15 and I have been up for nearly four hours and I have already washed and blow-dried a cat.

On the plus side, he is very pleasingly soft and fluffy once he’s all blown-dry.

Anyway, I need your help. 

We have a bar area in the basement, and it’s beautiful. But a) we don’t really have people over to do whatever one does in one’s home bar, and b) I would like to keep the basement as kid-friendly as possible as Carla gets older, so that I feel safe having The Teens over to our house. 

Right now, it’s very much A Bar, with room to display glasses, two wine racks filled with wine bottles, and three cupboards that are supposed to hold a variety of glasses. My husband used to display his collection of European beer glasses on the display shelves, but we relocated those to the cupboards once we got a kitten. 

The wine in the racks is not drinkable. The previous owners left it here, and noted before they did that it was not drinkable; it was purely for aesthetic purposes. Where a person obtains decorative wine bottles – which, to be clear, are full of real if not drinkable wine – I do not know, nor do I understand why anyone might pay for wine they knew they would not drink, but to each his own. My father, who knows wine, tested a couple of bottles just to make sure the previous owners weren’t, like, super wine snobs and the wine was fine if not great, but he agrees that it is not drinkable. This is to say that I feel no qualms about getting rid of the wine, except that it does seem like kind of a colossal waste. (I had the brilliant  insane thought in the middle of the night that perhaps I could donate it to a church that offers communion. I have had communion wine and it is not what I would refer to as drinkable either. But a) that’s probably dumb for a billion reasons and b) even if it isn’t as dumb as I really think it is, I would not know how to go about offering or transferring my bounty to a church anyway.) 

Anyway, if anyone knows any uses for undrinkable wine, let me know. 

What I really want to know is what else I can use the wine rack/glasses display area FOR. It turns out I am completely unimaginative in this respect. My brain has zero issue coming up with wild and horrifying explanations for whatever made that creaking sound in my living room at 3:45 am. But try to come up with alternative uses for the bar space, and I’ve got nothing.

My husband keeps his Nespresso machine in the bar area. Maybe we could use the wine racks to store mugs? Sleeves of Nespresso pods? (I’m joking about the latter.) Maybe we could remove the wine racks on one side and put in a shelf and an outlet and keep the Nespresso machine there instead of on the bar? 

It seems like “removing the wine racks and replacing them with shelves” might be the best plan, if that’s even possible.

My friend Jen (HI JEN) is expert at hosting The Teens at her house, and I seem to remember that she has a fancy smoothie machine in her basement and maybe a popcorn maker. I wonder if the wine rack spaces are deep enough to hold either or both of those things? Maybe we could put in a microwave? 

The glasses display area also seems like space that could be repurposed. I mean, I like my husband’s beer glasses collection just fine, but it does get dusty and it seems like a bad idea to have a bunch of glasses hanging around out in the open if you plan to have The Teens over. (Also: the kitten.) But what else could possibly go in that space? 

I have googled a bit, trying to find examples of other people who have similarly transformed their bar areas into something less alcohol-focused… but I haven’t really found anything that struck me as useful. 

What would you do with this space?