It's a Tiki Bar Building Marathon!

WHEW!!

The last 10 days were a marathon of tiki bar building.

My aching EVERYTHING!!!!  I hit the chiropractor this morning & headed in for a massage shortly.

Anyway - here's what we've been doing the past several days......

LOTS of bamboo to torch & shellac!

BOOZE Shelving!

& the awning for the side door.....

He whipped that up in about an hour!

We managed to get a few tiki mugs on the shelves in the house before our bar preview party

AHI having fun in the paper that the mugs were wrapped in!

Had a few friends over to check out our progress to-date...

& No rest for the Tiki Wicked - Back to work!!!

& a few views with some of the art hanging up....

The raising of The Tiki over the front door.....

& The Bird (aka MaiTai) is going to miss her buddy Ben - you can tell she doesn't want him to leave!!

Ah, yes, and still plenty more work to do now that Ben is back in California.

Here I'm starting to prep the bartop for the resin pour.  We won't pour the resin until all other work is complete, as it has to be dust-free, 75 degrees minimum & can only be poured ⅛" at a time - it'll be quite the project!!!

Now just to keep the contractors from damaging it between now & then!

& the contractors ******CLAIM***** they will be done in the next month with flooring, plumbing, lighting, etc.

If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you......

Stay tuned!

A home for our tiki mugs!

Most of out Tiki Mugs have been in boxes for almost 6 years!  And tomorrow we get to begin to free them.  YIPPEE!!!

Because on the wall of the dining room in our house, we had the FABULOUS shelves built today!

10' x 16'!!

Yes, you can get splinters from Bamboo!

A great couple days pulling the bar together with LOTS of progress!!

First up - routing the designs on the boards....MORE burning.....then scraping, then applying a semi-gloss clear finish:

Ah, yes, later Monday night - definitely time to get a little goofy ;)

The drink rail is up, along with some tapa & matting....

Tuesday morning - time to get some bamboo split & burned at the joints so it looks a bit better.....the burning is how I discovered bamboo splinters!

& this is how Bamboo Ben gets his name:

Only about ¼ of the bamboo we'll be using.....

Then it goes up on the bottom of the walls & looks AMAZING!!!!

Then I applied a coat of Zinsser Amber Shellac to make them even prettier!!!!

STAY TUNED!

Much more to come!

Progress......We're Exhaustified!!!!!!!!!!

GREAT hands-on day today here starting to see the inside of the bar come together!  Dirty & tired, we wrapped it up around 8:30 tonight.

Oh - and, yes, one our our handful of truly COLD-ASS days here in Austin, so we tried to stay warm with a little fire.......

The day started off with some pretty light duty work....Ben was easing us into it ;)

First, we started designing the trim boards, which will be routed & stained:

Then the wall matting started to go up!

This particular matting is called Bac Bac

Then - the FUN really began!

See all of these...........

These are boards which will become shelving all around the bar

ALL of them have to be first burned to a dark color.....

& then Each one has to be brushed with a grill brush to get the char off - the color remains, which will later we treated with a clear coat.

CRAZY DIRTY job - for sure!!!

And, while we only got a few boards scraped, we felt like coal miners by the end of the night!

MORE dirty work tomorrow night after work!

Moving right along........

We managed to knock out a base coat of paint before New Year's weekend ended.  This coat will serve as a base coat to go under the matting, so it doesn't matter how good it looks.  It's AMAZING how fast painting goes when there's no edging involved & no worries about it looking perfect!!!

Oh - and this is the stuff the walls will be covered with - it's called bac bac & the paint functions to fill in any spots that may show-up between the weave:

Oh - and we'll be attaching bamboo to the bottom of the walls (on plywood), so we didn't need to do the bottom of the walls.

Next-up - starting to prep for making the bar top, which will be broken tiki mugs embedded in resin.  Here's some of what we'll use for the tiki mug shards....

& the cabinets went in today - next-up will be painting the cabinets:

& the Mini Split AC/Heat unit also went in today!

It won't be functional until the electricians turn the electricity on, but getting there....

& the FABULOUS Front door, which came off of an old ship!

More to come!!!