I initially held off posting photos of the "finished" bar as I wanted those coming to see it in person to have at least some surprise during the initial viewing.  Two parties have come and gone at Tiki Bar 3.0 though, so I feel it is time to put up some pictures of the "completed" bar now for those who won't be able to make it out to see the bar anytime soon.

• The best overall shot I've been able to get so far.
• The stats screen, also where Tiki Grams show up during parties
• The under-gate shelving
• The Drink-o-Tron PC and the mixer cabinet
• Inside the mixer cabinet
• The rum shelf - from top to bottom: flavors, premium, standards, more standards, other (yes it's all rum)
• A shot down the frame for the overhead lighting - looking toward the window.
• The glass rack
• The back of the bar
• A shot down the stools, showing off the front-bar lighting
• Of the the Tiki Room walls - and current home of the wall of shots.
• Another Tiki Room wall
• The first thing you see on your way downstairs to the Tiki Room
• New Stools - Dancing Tiki, Easter Island Head, Monkey Drumming, Hula Girl

The Tiki Bar is never really done of course. :)

What a week!  I sat down on Monday morning and put together a list of every single task I could think of that needed to be done before Hallowiki and despite being really pleased with our progress so far...it was a REALLY long list.  So I put together a schedule as best I could, based on what needed to be done and what time was available and I've been cranking hard on it all week.  Thankfully, things are coming along really nicely on the schedule.  Thanks to Jeff and Sarah's help yesterday and Jeff's help this morning, all of the big stuff that I was concerned about is done.  There are two things left to poly and attach and then after that it is just pub tables, decor stuff and little optional projects that don't have to be done by Hallowiki (and cleaning).

Progress lately: put shelves in the big upper cabinet, attached fridge trim, put another coat of poly on the bamboo trim and front bar top, cut the transition molding for the floor, cut and frosted the plexiglass for the ceiling fixture, mounted the dartboard, built the gate-stop, cut, stained, poly'd and mounted the oak trim to face the ceiling MDF, built and put up the stemware rack, wired up the display shelf lighting, updated the TikiLighting program to control them, installed the ceiling speakers, and put up the stats screen.

It's official - it's starting to look like a Tiki Bar.  The front bar shelf lighting is in and looking sexy, the back bar light fixture is mounted and wired up, the doors are on the above-fridge cabinet and it is mounted in place, I built a custom monitor stand to get the monitor to be just the right height - it still needs to be stained and poly'd, the bamboo trim is in place on the back bar - it just needs a coat or two of poly and some woody putty to cover the screw holes, the bamboo panelling is in place on the front of the bar, good progress is being made on the stemware rack, I finally took the time to put up the blinds on the Tiki bar window so that I don't feel like the neighbors are staring at me as I work on the bar, and we got the RGB LEDs wired up under the bar overhang...which looks so hot....enjoy the bar in green, red, blue, teal, pink, and yellow.  We also got the gel frames up for the over-bar lighting, so we can create a nice two-tone effect.

Remaining items: display shelf lighting, trim on the front bar, shelves in the upper cabinet, finishing the stemware rack and monitor stand, covering some exposed MDF and 2x4s in the ceiling, putting in ceiling speakers, building the pub tables, mounting the dart board, hanging decorations and "beta testing".  That's all I can think of at this point - so close!!

The todo list for the bar gets shorter every day - we're quickly running out of "construction" tasks leaving only "finishing" and "wiring" tasks to work through.  Sadly, my photo-taking has fallen behind a bit so I won't have photographic evidence to back up much of this update, but I have a pretty sexy picture to show off anyway, so hopefully you'll forgive me.

The back bar display shelves have been glued up, stained and poly'd.  The floor-to-ceiling shelves on the left wall have been stained, poly'd and set in place.  The above-fridge cabinet has been wood-puttied, stained, poly'd and temporarily set in place.  The doors for it have been built, trimmed, stained, and poly'd (I expect to attach them this evening).  The front bar wood trim has been stained, poly'd and attached, the front bar shelves have been attached.  All in all, the view of the front bar from the bartender's side is looking quite nice.  Cup's light fixture has been stained, poly'd, trimmed, attached to the ceiling and plugged in.  The gel frames for the above-bar lighting have been built, stained and had the first coat of poly put on them.  The wires have been run for the Tiki Bar PC and it is nicely up and running...on an interesting note - it would be fairly accurate to say that the cables for the Tiki Bar computer have been run "through the bath tub".  Keep that in mind if you happen to shower in the Tiki Bathroom (no splashing! You'll short out the USB! Not really...)

Remaining on the todo list are several lighting projects (under-bar shelves, display shelves, etc), running cable for and mounting the Drink-o-tron stats display screen, putting in speakers for the Tiki Audio system, and lots of trim work.  Working with all of these small projects it is easy to lose sight of the grand vision, so Jeff and I took some time (ok, a fair amount of time) to grab a small assortment of the Tiki Bar's liquor collection to get a feel for how it is going to look when it is done.  See what you think...view #1 and view #2.

Well this weekend was another giant leap forward for the Tiki Bar.  Klug & Cup came down from Jersey again, bringing Tom along this time as well.  Luke came over to lend a hand as well, and Sarah provided us all with much needed sustenance to keep us going.  (MMmmm...warm soft pretzels).

The big thrust of the weekend was shelving.  All of the shelf supports and shelves for the front bar were cut, stained and put in place.  They haven't been screwed down yet so that I can pull them out and poly them.  The floor to ceiling shelves for the left side of the bar are all cut out, awaiting stain and poly.  The back bar display shelves and supports are all cut, notched and ready to be glued together.  They can then be stained and poly'd.  (Can you tell I have a lot of staining and polying to do?)  In addition to herculean shelving feats, we also cut out and put together most of the above-fridge cabinet, built a sexy-ass custom light fixture to go over the back bar (I'll be able to see the blender!), cut and stained the trim that will cover the 2x4s of the front bar, and stained the back of the plywood that covers the front of the front bar (so that when you're behind the bar looking at the shelves, there isn't ugly plain plywood staring back at you).

Last week, Jeff and I also managed a number of small tiki projects in preparation for people's arrival.  We hung the cabinet doors on the large cabinet, mounted the trim on the back bar, hung up the outdoor Tiki Sign and secured the window cover in place, ran some cabling, and cut the plywood for the bar front.

Thanks to a herculean effort by many loyal tiki partners in crime (Jeff, Klug, Cup & Jason), major progress was made on the bar last weekend.  A couple of weeks ago I had noticed that for some reason (probably my ineptitude at getting the pressure right on the kegerator) some beer had leaked out of the keg, down the inside of the kegerator, out the kegerator door and down into the MDF floor that we had put underneath the bar.  When the beer didn't dry within a couple of days (despite pointing a fan at it) I got concerned that perhaps the MDF had soaked through and was doing damage to the classy (and expensive) bamboo floor that we had put in.  That became priority one for the weekend - determine the extent of the damage.

It was even worse than I had feared - not only had the beer soaked through the MDF, it was growing mold.  Nasty, stinky, potentially life-threatening mold.  An entire sheet of MDF + a piece of another sheet had to go.  After many calculations to determine if we actually had enough MDF to replace that and still build the bar top (buying more was somewhat out of the question due to the soaking Tropical Storm Hanna was giving the DC area that day) we set about replacing the moldy sections of floor (which included cutting one section out in place overtop of the expensive bamboo (yikes!).  Success was achieved, and we set out to create a water-proof cradle under the kegerator to prevent such an occurrence in the future.  Thankfully I had a full sheet of tileboard sitting around from another project and between that and a liberal application of silicon caulk, we succeeded.  All of that, of course, created no actual visible progress.  It was just getting us back to square one sans mold.  On to the fun stuff.

Bars are almost inherently unstable because they all have an overhang so that you can put your knees under the bar and they're generally quite shallow front-to-back.  Because of this, there was concern among many of us that the bar top would be prone to tipping forward if people leaned on it (not a good property to have in a bar).  Tiki Bar 2.0 avoided this problem by being L shaped, but Tiki Bar 3.0 isn't designed that way.  The plan was always to attach the bar to the MDF floor that we put in, but that floor is only a half inch thick - not a lot of material to screw into, and we may at some point in the future have to temporarily remove the front bar to replace the refrigerator (if it dies).  Screwing the bar back down after doing so would mean the screws would bite even less into the material...scary.  Jeff had the excellent idea to buy T-Nuts to solve this issue, it basically embeds a nut into the MDF floor and we then bolt it in - bolts grip nuts much better than screws grip wood and you can put them in and take them out as many times as you want.  Getting the T-nuts in after having already installed the floor was challenging, but doable.  In went the framing for the front bar, and the bar top.  Yay!

Other progress for the weekend: Started the shelves that the gate will rest on (the squarest thing in the entire house - including the house), notched the floor-to-ceiling support for the left hand wall shelves, and picked out vinyl tile to cover the MDF floor under the bar.

Since then, I've made some personal progress on the bar as well - I did some more work on the shelves that the gate will rest on, stained & put the first couple of coats of poly on the bar top, and I started on the lower cabinet door.  There is much more to do, but things are shaping up nicely.

Jeff's been spending some quality time with his girlfriend before she starts law school and I haven't had a free Saturday to try to get Klug or Cup down, so construction has been slow lately.  Progress has been made however, as you can see in the latest set of construction photos.  I've put several coats of poly on the upper and lower cabinet, started on the door for the lower cabinet (I'm quite pleased with the mahogany stain on the trim), Jeff got all of the CFLs wired up for the in-roof lighting, I've got the tiki tap handle on the kegerator and I rigged up a ghetto-ass tower-cooling solution for the kegerator so it doesn't pour nearly so much foam.  The new dishwasher is supposed to arrive this afternoon, so I'll try to get that all hooked up and get a photo of the back bar with the new dishwasher in place and a photo of the crazy tower cooling solution for you guys.  Next up on the todo list are the over-refrigerator cabinet and the door for the upper cabinet, then we move on to the front bar.  Until next time, keep it tiki!

Bloggin' Time

Well I figure it is high time I added some way to keep you folks informed of progress in the Tikisphere, so I've added this here bloggin feature to the Tiki Bar Website.  I'll try to post here with updates on Tiki Bar 3.0, the Tiki bar website, links to party photos, etc.

Tiki Bar 3.0 Design

Tiki Bar 1.0 was basically a U-shaped front bar.  Tiki Bar 2.0 was a roughly an L-shaped front bar with some minor rear shelving.  Tiki Bar 3.0 will have a straight front bar and a full, straight back bar. The back bar will house liquor display shelving, a sink, kegerator, dishwasher, full-size refrigerator and some additional storage.  The front bar will have liquor and glassware storage.

Tiki Bar 3.0 Progress

So far the refrigerator has been purchased off of craig's list and put in place, the kegerator has been purchased and installed, and the back bar has been framed, the back bar-top put on, and the large left-side cabinet has been built.  The left-side cabinet still needs doors, the over-the-fridge cabinet still needs to be built, and none of the trim work has been done.  We purchased a dishwasher off of craig's list, but sadly it leaks, so a new one has been ordered and should be here on Friday.

Website Updates

I've added a short history of the wall-of-shots and a brief description of the Drink-o-Tron 3000 to the About the Bar page and I've drastically increased the speed of the statistics area.