Post #536347 by Club Nouméa on Tue, Jun 15, 2010 12:28 AM

Over 3 weeks have passed since my last post, so it is high time for an update on the tiki bar installation work.

First, the corner the bar is in was cleared away so that the makeover could begin, and I fitted some new curtains (Kaipara Brick Red from Soft Touch):

The whole house has the strandboard flooring you can see in the photo above, so I put in a new floor covering to help physically delineate the bar area/dining table area from the rest of the open-plan living room:

For lighting the dining table, I found a nice loungey-looking lampshade, and a nice zebra-striped lamp for mood lighting for the bar area:

I found this beauty (made in New Zealand) in a local lighting shop and liked it so much I got a smaller matching one for the bedroom. The large one is 1.4 metres high and has a foot switch:

The next step was to deal with the awful pointless rear window that looks out on a dirt bank. To give you an idea of just how much I hate this window, here is what the view looks like on a rainy evening:

And another view:

The idea was to board up this horrible window so it could be put to a better purpose. I used some scrap wood to provide some support for the hardboard that was to be nailed over the top of it:

Then I nailed in the hardboard onto the supports. This was a nerve-wracking operation, because even though I made sure the nails were short enough to avoid hitting the windowframe or glass, there was still the possibility that the hammer impacts might crack the pane. Fortunately they didn't:

Then up went my monster blow-up of a 6 x 4-inch photo of a sunset on Nouméa's Anse Vata beach that I took back in the '90s. The guy in the photo shop recommended some hideously expensive aerosol adhesive designed for photographic paper that looked way too toxic for me to want to be spraying it in the vicinity of my kitchen, so I went and got a very large gluestick instead and that worked fine:

Sadly, in real life, this beautiful view has been ruined in recent years by a tacky pier built in the middle of the bay, and a large new hotel in the middle of the peninsula in the background that is way out of proportion with its environment and whose silhouette resembles a massive concrete blockhouse when the sun sets behind it. That's progress...

Something I immediately noticed once the photo was in position was that there was a problem with glare from the room lighting:

After some initial cursing and swearing, I decided the easiest solution was to do what you do with a normal window when there is too much glare from the sun - install blinds:

To save $$$ and avoid hassles with the blinds getting caught up in the curtains, I bought blinds that were narrower than the overall width of the window:

With the curtains in position though, you don't even notice:

As you can see, I also used a couple of bits of waste plywood and skirting I had lying around, applied some appropriate matching timber stain to them, and nailed them into the bottom of the window frame to fill in where the exposed hardboard was.

But the window was not finished yet. More about that in the next instalment....

CN