Hello again, fellow tiki lovers!
Part II--The "before" photos: Prettyman's Atoll as it looks today (literally three hours ago).
A brief history of Prettyman's Atoll: (skip this paragraph if you don't want construction details) From what I can tell, the tiki room began as a central portion of the backyard in 1960. At some point, the owner poured a cement pad roughly the size of today's tiki room. A little later, he put up a lightweight roof structure of 2x6 beams on 24-inch centers, capped with corrugated aluminum. The structure was just strong enough to hold up the lightweight aluminum sheets. A little later, he added non-structural side walls that served primarily as a means to install a pair of sliding glass doors on each wall. He then built the bar you'll see shortly, and ran cold water to the sink and a gas line to a heater (the drain for the sink is just a pipe that sticks though the wall and waters our mint bush). Finally, he decided to put a much beefier asphalt and gravel roof on 3/4-inch plywood that he threw on top of the existing aluminum panels. The increased weight of the new roof was vastly more than the flimsy, knotty 2x6 beams could handle, and over the years they've sagged and even failed at knots (structural select lumber this ain't). When we bought the place two years ago, we quickly discovered that the weight of pooled rainwater on the sagging roof was threatening to collapse the compromised roof. The roof needs to be completely replaced, but so too do the walls and the bucking slab and cracked footings.
In essence, we've got to completely rebuild the tiki room to save it. We're seeing this as a design opportunity--to make the tiki room into the tiki room of our dreams (or at least to the extent that we can afford on our non-profit worker bee salaries). Here's what we're working with:
The entrance to the tiki room:
One of the design principles I adhere to is that there should be a clear division between the tiki world and the real world. It doesn't have to be as extreme as at Smuggler's Cove (although well done, guys!), but there should be some dividing line or threshold; something to keep the real world hidden from folks in the tiki room, and vice versa.
Right now, the tiki room is too much a part of our 'regular' house. There's a 6-foot-wide sliding glass door entrance as you can see above (as well as a 6-foot-wide window between the living room and the tiki room, as you'll see in a moment).
I'd like to see this replaced with a 36-inch-wide heavy wooden door that looks like it came off a 17th-century English ship. And even after opening the door, visitors would first have to pass through a dark anteroom before emerging into the tiki room. This might be as simple as a heavy black curtain a few feet inside the door, or it might be something constructed of dark wood with a second door at the end--like a very short passageway.
Another important detail--when I replace the 2x6 beams on 24-inch centers with 2x12 beams on 12-inch-centers, we'll lose precious headroom. My wife and I are both six-foot-plus, and we'd be close to scraping our heads on the ceiling if we left the floor where it is. Since we can't raise the roof (the ledger board is as high as it can go and we're not keen to re-engineer the roof of the main house), we'll be lowering the tiki room floor by 16 inches. It's not much, but it'll give us a bit of room to hang nets and whatnot from the ceiling. I haven't given up on finding a way to (also) raise the roof, but that looks like it's going to add considerable complexity and cost to the project. Right now, there's one step down from the house to the tiki room, but after the remodel, there will be three steps down (further accentuating the divide, and evoking a feeling of going below deck on an old sailing ship.
Inside the tiki room, looking back at the entrance:
Again, note the lack of separation between tiki and normal worlds. The chair is a hand-carved chair I purchased from a bar in the Afar region of Ethiopia when I worked there in the early 1990s. In a former life, I spent a lot of time working in remote places in Africa and the Near East, and I've love a chance to show off some of the more exotic things I brought back. Right now, there's just no wall or shelf space to do so. Also, pardon the parrot and toucan. We're still trying to educate the in-laws on what tiki is and what it isn't. We ask them not to get us things for the tiki room, but there you go.
Panning to the left a bit:
Yeah, that's the beginnings of a model train layout. No one can accuse me of having too few hobbies. For now, the train table will stay in the tiki room (we have nowhere else to put it), but I'm hoping to have it hinge up out of the way when not in use (to where that metal-framed window is now). We're going to get rid of the window and make it into a solid wall to gain more wall space and to have more of a separation between our living space and the tiki room.
Looking to the east:
The tiki room sits between our two (!) backyards. This photo shows the view to the east onto our main back yard with pool and (someday soon) tropical plantings. The pool deck and coping also needs to be completely redone, but that will come after the tiki room. Someday we hope to have the tiki motif spill into this yard, with a fire feature, waterfall(s), large tikis, fun lighting, outdoor speakers, torches, and perhaps even a moai. The yard was barren clay when we bought the house (the previous owners had every living thing in the backyard removed), so you're seeing the result of two years of my wife coaxing life back into the yard.
While it's nice having the pool right there, and we certainly want to encourage people to move freely from tiki room to pool, we want to make this into a solid wall and have another heavy wooden door and an enclosed dark wooden staircase to transition from tiki room to pool area.
Looking to the west:
This is looking towards our daughter's yard (she's 3 years old). We'll also be making this into a solid wall with a solid wooden door exiting to a stairway to her yard. We have plans to turn the nearer half of this yard into a two-story addition to the house once our daughter is too old to appreciate having her own play yard. That won't impact things too much in the near term, but I will be designing this end of the tiki room to eventually support a second story (plus we'll want to use the roof as a place to go to watch the stars (yes, another hobby) and see the bay (it's the only place in our house with a view of the bay).
The bar, from the entrance to the tiki room:
Finally, what you came here for. I removed the bar stools for this shot, as they're seriously out of character (picture chrome legs and red and black leather seats).
The whole room (and the entire pool deck!) used to be carpeted in AstroTurf, but now the foot rest is the only remnant of that artificial green glory. The thatching is old and brittle and needs to be replaced. The bar is nice and long (8 feet), but I'd like to make it even longer (probably about 10 feet). This would mean losing the 1960s-laminate bar surface and moving to something like a dark mahogany bar surface. I really like what the original owner did with the bamboo edges, and I'd like to replicate that.
The top shelves:
One thing that a couple of years collecting rums has shown us is that we need A LOT more shelf space for liquor. The top shelf is a heavy-duty 12-inch-deep, 8-foot-wide red oak shelf I installed last summer to get extra space, but we filled it almost immediately. The black-and-white-checked shelves are light-duty 8- and 10-inch-deep shelves that came with the house. These latter shelves are thin, the supports are weak, and a lot of space is lost to a mini-fridge at the bottom left. I want to move the fridge to under the side leg of the bar, in large part to free up a lot more space for shelves. Another problem I've got is that folks can't see the tasty rums I've got in the second and third rows of the 12-inch-deep shelf.
The bottom shelves (back stock, bitters, and whatnot):
I have a liquor storage problem, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Part of me dreams of putting in a sub-floor storage area for back stock, and other part of me sees heavy-duty drawers as the answer. I have no experience as a bartender, so I'll have to see how other folks solve this problem before committing to a solution.
The Prettyman's Atoll sign:
This was my first attempt at a sign for our bar, but I'm thinking that the new Prettyman's Atoll will need something bigger, heavier, and less two-dimensional. And probably a lot less blue, too.
The side leg of the bar:
This is where I keep my swizzle sticks, stirrers, straws, and various tchotchke. Under the bar is where I keep all my mixing equipment, umbrellas, plastic monkeys, electric ice cubes, mixer, skewers, and whatnot. Originally, 2-3 people could actually sit on that side of the bar and be served, but due to a lack of storage and display space, the bar surface currently serves that purpose.
My naval bell and bos'n's whistle:
I use these to signal when a drink is ready (folks may go to the pool, backyard, kitchen, or wherever after they order their drinks, but I've instilled a Pavlovian response that gets them running back to the bar when they hear either of these).
My glassware, vintage liquor, and board game storage/display cabinets:
These cabinets would do a good job of displaying the more interesting and lightly used glassware, but they're really bothersome for the heavily used glassware (all my glassware is stored here). I have to leave the bar back every time I make a drink, as there is zero glassware storage behind the bar. I'd like to have a place to keep the most heavily used glassware behind the bar, but out of sight. I also have a small but growing collection of vintage tiki-relevant bottles that I store in these cabinets.
This is one of my favorite vintage finds (still mostly full)--Korean-War-era bottle (I think) of Beachcomber Scorpion mix, with a "U.S. Navy Mess" sticker.
This is Stanley and a disassembled WWII-era bomb:
I'd really like to find a way to incorporate Stanley and the bomb into the redesigned/rebuilt bar.
Well, that's it for today. In my next post, I'll talk more about ideas and dreams for the rebuilt tiki room. I'm teaching myself Revit now, so hopefully soon I'll be able to share some 3D renderings of ideas for the tiki room.
[ Edited by: Prettyman's Atoll 2018-01-28 18:11 ]
[ Edited by: Prettyman's Atoll 2018-01-28 18:27 ]
[ Edited by: Prettyman's Atoll 2018-01-28 22:11 ]
