Post #531782 by Club Nouméa on Sat, May 22, 2010 10:10 PM

Thanks for the positive feedback about the bedroom. It was nice to see several hundred hits as the result of people dropping by to have a look.

Work has started on the bar project, although it is still at the stage of assembling materials, so there is not much to show yet.

For the time being, here are a couple of "before" photos of the bar area to give an idea of what I am working with. I am fortunate to have a very functional bar-type structure already in place, so there is no heavy rebuilding work required:

As you can see, the kitchen is enclosed by an L-shaped interior wall. The idea is to turn this entire structure into a tiki-style hut within my house, using tapa cloth and/or matting, and bamboo applied to the top half of the wall, which is currently painted light green. The lower wood panelling already looks pretty good to me, so that is staying, and I will possibly attach some carvings at fixed intervals along it. I would also like a Melanesian totem attached to the uprights at each end of the bar, and these are going to have to be customised to fit the existing structure, so we will see what my carving skills are like. If that fails, I will try painted totems instead. In New Caledonia, traditionally they had these totems on entrances to huts etc. They consist of a rectangular post featuring a geometric pattern most of the way up (squares, criss-crossed lines, diamond-shaped markings), with a benign, smiling or angry face on top of them.

Here is another shot that shows some of the back wall and a better view into the kitchen:

I am going to extend the tiki-style wall cladding along this back wall and around the curtained window you can see in the left foreground. This window is completely redundant. It looks out of the back of my house at an earth bank. All you can see through it is the bank itself, some tree roots and some weeds. That corner of the house receives no sunlight whatsover, so I am boarding over the window and installing a monster-sized enlargement of a photo I once took of the sunset at Anse Vata beach, which is Nouméa's equivalent of Waikiki beach. I received the enlargement some days ago and it looks great. The guy in the photo shop said it was the largest blow-up he had ever done from a 4 x 6-inch photo. And it wasn't digital either (probably just as well, or it would have pixellated like crazy).

So that's where things stand at the moment. I will keep you posted with further developments.

CN