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.