Post #653266 by mike and marie on Mon, Sep 24, 2012 8:35 PM

Early on, we knew we had to get some bamboo. This is a tiki bar, right? A neighbor down the street had a backyard jungle of it and was more than happy to let us harvest all we needed ... and then some ... for our quixotic adventure. In the end, we wound up with enough live plants to make a little backyard jungle of our own. The stuff grows like grass! Wait, it is grass!

This was fine for all the small decorative stuff and for the bamboo pieces that will fill the overhang above the bar. But we needed some big pieces, too, and for that we found some well weathered stuff in a back corner of a local nursery, where gauging by what was left of the dot matrix price tags this was out there since at least the second term of the Reagan administration. They had to figure out what they would charge us (or with a smile offer to pay us to take it off the premises) and let's just say that in the end we were all happy:

A few good scrubbings with wood deck cleaner turned it from white to brown ... and when it dried we saw that it had been completely restored to its blonde-yellow glory! The difference was amazing. Then some Cabot's for good measure and we let it sit for a few days before working on it.

Built a simple frame out of four of the long pieces by carving out slots on the ends for the pieces to fit together without sliding (which were then secured with screws) and the corners tied with raffia. Applied a light coat or two for finishing wax to the whole frame to give it that hard shine. Hung it on the ceiling over the bar with eyelets at just enough of an incline so that the individual bamboo pieces of the frame would hang down but not fall out:

Now with the overhang done, the concept proven (the final design uses a lot more bamboo and wire, not the nylon here in the pics), it was time to take it all down and put it away so that the ceiling above the bar could be painted black!

[ Edited by: mike and marie 2012-09-24 20:42 ]