Update #4 Building the bar

It's not going to be much of a Gin bar until we actually have a bar so with the completion of the new back wall it was time to turn my attention to building one. I would like to thank Steve Dodson for his assistance and advice and also to apologise to him for accidentally screwing into his thumb. Luckily he didn't bleed onto the wood so everything was OK, panic over.

I already had a rough idea of what I wanted to build and that can be seen in the model that I built, pictured here on the right.

There were a number of key considerations like, how high, how long, how deep, how much working space behind it, what wood to use, what colour, do I align the end to the doorway and so on.

Mr Google reliably informed me that the optimum height of a bar based on average heights of women and men is 42 inches from the floor to the top of the bar so that one was easy.

I kind of liked the grey colour that I had put into the model and after speaking to a number of people I decided to go with that. For the top I decided on a mid oak colour given that the chairs will be that colour. So then it was time to actually start assembling it.

I selected a hard wood top that would be durable and used two three metre lengths of

beach wood that we glued together. For the front I used the original bar box which I cut to the correct height. We then attached a piece of plywood to which we would fix all of the panels.

The bar had to fit around a refridgeration unit and to get my head around the overall placement and the front design, I laid it out on the floor first.

Then it was time to start cutting and assemblng everything. Cutting to size and fixing the front timber was surprisingly quick and simple although somewhat painful for Steve.

Next came the job of staining the front and the top which for me was the scary part because it might actually look rubbish but I guess you folks will be the judges of that when you walk in

through the doors for the first time.

This is what it looked like after the first coat of grey wood stain. Just for the record, the finished product ended up with three coats of wood stain. You can also see from this picture that I decided not to align the end with the door frame, I wanted as much bar space as possible.

Staining the top was also a bit scary. I won't bore you with the details of why but it would have been so easy to mess it up. However it all turned out more or less as I wanted it to.

I have also added some strip light LED under the front edge and you can get a feel for that in the last image in the blog.

In the original mock up image I had some glass holders over the top of the bar so we got a

local guy who works with metal (I call him Iron Man) to put something together for us.

I bought the actual glass holders from Amazon, at huge expense, and Iron Man fixed them to the frame and as you can see here, it's ready to be installed.

Once the frame was in place, I then installed the new lights in the bar and the almost-finsided-end-result can be seen below.

We're getting there, slowly but surely.

Thanks for reading and for your support.

Mal