Post #772917 by Ragbag Comics on Mon, Feb 13, 2017 12:09 PM

Hey folks -

Got a little more done in the ol' Black Lagoon Room this weekend. We bought an alarming amount of wood to start building the main wall of shelves and the bump out to cover the electrical boxes, but haven't begun the actual construction of those yet. Likely, that'll be this weekend.

In the meantime, we're still trying to get our lighting right and I think we're moving in the right direction. In the first little sitting area you approach at the bottom of the stairs, I hung these super cool Japanese-style lanterns we found on eBay a few years ago...

Also, you can see we added some fake foliage in that corner. The big Tiki there has some tropical plants and such around his base now, which was fun to put together. Thankful for that 50% off sale at the craft store:

We sorted out one wall of mugs as well... a few bunches of location-specific mugs (this shelf has a lot from Frankies, some from Bahooka, a few Disney pieces, Hala Kahiki, Kon Tiki, etc) The main wall of the bar will feature 8ft of floor to ceiling shelving... We plan to house the vast majority of our mugs in the basement bar, but I think there are currently Tiki mugs in every room of the house (except the bathroom)...! Last count on Ooga Mooga was about 350 or so. I have some little selected displays of stuff from the Mai Kai, Aku Aku, Kon Tiki Ports, and Trader Vic's in our dining room on a shelf (though we have a lot more Trader Vic's stuff than would fit in this little space...)

There are monster-themed mugs in the Mid-Century Monster Room:

There are some Witco-inspired mugs on the shadow box WAY down on the far wall in our TV room (which we refer to as the Jungle Room... lots of Witco, lots of 70's wall paper and wood paneling... it made sense.)

...a few Asian-inspired mugs in the Living room, and some Hula girl mugs in the bedroom that I don't have pictures of at the moment. All the shrunken head mugs will be behind the bar...Regardless... lots of mugs!

But this one wall in the basement is looking pretty good now:

The lights are just little fiber optic LEDs on a copper wire... they were REALLY on sale on Amazon. Four 30-ft rolls for $20. They work great, and run on a USB. We have a power strip with USB ports build in that this plugs into. I'm thinking I'll probably wrap the lights around some rope just to make it look a little more nautical and in keeping with the theme of the rest of the bar. Parts of the shelf will be wrapped in rope eventually, and we plan to frame out part of the wall with rope.

Speaking of walls, we added a bunch of old 50's monster movie photos to the hallway. Kind of an homage to when restaurants would have autographed pictures of famous people who'd eaten there in the entryway - since it's the Black Lagoon Room, we went with a monster theme. Apologies these pictures suck. The bar is DARK! I lightened these as much as I could in photoshop... but you'll see stills from all three Creature movies (duh), Horror at Party Beach, the Hideous Sun Demon, Ro-Man from Robot Monster, Creature from the Haunted Sea, Alligator People, Beach Girls and the Monster, etc etc... These are just at the bottom of the stairs as you enter the bar, shrunken heads above you (dangling over your full-sized head)

We wanted kind of an old, ethnographic Ripley's Believe it Or Not feel to parts of the bar. Hence, I printed out and hung some framed old images from textbooks and other sources of old Polynesian weapons, maps, etc. Here's a few hanging just over that mug shelf a few images back...

A photo of one of the seating areas; We found the table on Craigslist for $100! It's nearly identical to some of the low cocktail tables Trader Vic's has used over the years, and to Elvis' coffee table in the Jungle Room. We have a much bigger burl table in our living room that is similar to this one as well.

I added a light to the diving helmet... it's a Toscano cast-resin piece, but looks just like a real helmet. We found that on Cragislist as well. The Dodge hula girl lamp we've had for years (it still "dances!") and there's some other stuff thrown in there. That creature Halloween motion figure probably won't stay, but he photobombed this one anyway...

I'll post some photos later today, too, of our little Mermaid cove seating area which is fairly well together at this point.

We've been busy bees over here!

More soon!

--Pete