Post #507414 by Mai Tai on Wed, Jan 27, 2010 2:16 PM

On 2010-01-27 12:40, hanford_lemoore wrote:
This comes up from time to time. Here's my take on it:

Are we talking about showing off final pics of one's home bar? Or construction photos?

Tikiaki's post sounds like he's looking more for showing off. Mai Tai's request sounds like more of a how-to.

My thoughts are that I'd like to see equally both pics of people's completed home bars, as well as construction photos and how to's. On the pictures front, I was thinking that some people have bars that are already completed, whether they built them, had someone else build them, or purchased a house that where the bar was already pre-built. And also, maybe someone may have pics of a relative's or friend's home bar, but that friend isn't online or doesn't want to join Tiki Central. Or perhaps we have found some pics in a photo album either passed down from family members or found in a yard sale, that have some bitchin' home tiki bar photos. Where would we post pics like these? The Creating Tiki forum wouldn't really work so well in some of these cases, since the person posting those pics really didn't create anything.

Construction photos of home bar builds obviously could be argued that they belong in Creating Tiki. But like Boris mentions in this thread there are so many other threads of all the stuff that all of the artists are making, from carvings to paintings to ceramics to clothes to jewelry to whatever, that threads for home bar builds seem to get lost in a sea of artists posts, as well as a sea of posts there and in other forums that are in the wrong place, are from people that didn't use the search funtion, etc. To me, it seems like the amount of effort and care that people have put into their home bars, in an effort to help foster that aloha spirit and help keep tiki alive, deserves a little more recognition than just fading away in a sea of more generalized posts.

Also, if Home Bars were included in this section, I would assume it's for finished photos only, or perhaps general in-progress shots, but real how-tos and step-by-steps would belong in creating.

My thoughts on photos and how to's on the construction of home bars would also be in the "Home Tiki Bars" category. If the person wanted to get really detailed, and show exactly how he or she built each lamp, rain window effect that Boris will not be allowed to see, etc, in excruciating detail, then those details could be linked over to a thread in Creating Tiki. But the general details and ideas of what the person did or built could be generally conveyed in the "Home Tiki Bars" section. Take this thread by Bongofury, for example. He shows in a dozen or less pictures in one single post how he transformed an 8 foot tiki bar into a bathroom vanity, and remodeled the whole bathroom floor and all, which is a lot less photos than I'd show on how to build a tapa cloth fish trap lamp like the one I built at Monkeyman's lamp class. If I was posting a home bar build in "Home Tiki Bars", I would make a general post like Bongofury did in my thread on the bathroom tiki bar conversion, but would show how I built exactly built the tapa lamp in a detailed separate linked thread in Creating Tiki.

And additionally, if this forum included home and commerical spaces, I don't think this would satisfy what Mai Tai and others have been asking for, which is a single place for Home Bars.

Yeah, for my own personal tastes, I wouldn't want to see home bars lumped in with commercial bars, or commercial bar builds.

I'd also like to add that, as in life, not everything can easily be categorized as either black or white, but sometimes falls into a shade of gray. But I think that we may have hit upon an idea that that can be defined and categorized enough to stand on it's own merit. That being said, I'm also very interested in hearing more on what Hanford and others have to say on this. Let's keep those comments coming! :) Except for Boris.