Home bar in a surf shop...Now open

I figured after almost 8 years, it was time to check back in with Tiki Central. Since then, a few home bars have been built and demolished, thousands of miles have been traveled in pursuit of far-off tiki bars, many successful luau's have been had, thousands of cocktails have been consumed, and dozens of friends have been turned onto the life of sophisticated savagery.

Now that that's out of the way, here I go.

A few weeks back, my boss had expressed his interest in having me build a tiki bar in one of our retail stores that was undergoing a remodel. Basically something for people to look at and take pictures of. He had seen a small bar I had built in our warehouse with some stuff that I had had laying around (literally. After tearing the bar out of my apartment years ago, all of my stuff had been sitting in a back room at my house.) Of course I bit at the chance. Between planning, prep, searching all of the antique stores I could find, letgo/offerup/craigslist, and a few trips to Oceanic Arts, I have 15 days in (excluding Sundays) from start to finish.

Since I'm short on time, I figure I'll post a photo of the little temporary bar that was built in the hallway of our warehouse that inspired it all, and a couple before shots of the open space that the bar now resides in.

I wish I had uploaded some better photos earlier, but here's the bar that was built to store some of my stuff at work. It's about as basic as it gets as far as a good tiki bar goes, but that's for a purpose. Almost all of the stuff in it has to come down for a big luau that a group of friends and I throw each year (plus a ton of other pieces that are still stored at my house.) I think I may throw some palm panels up on the ceiling to cover the awful acoustic tiles, and accent the trim with some bamboo, but for the most part, I don't plan on spending too much more time on it.

And here's the space I had to work with. It's a back corner of an expanded building that we were remodeling. It's 11' wide by 6' deep by 14' tall. Not exactly the dream space I would have imagined, but beggars can't be choosers.

I'll get some progress shots going in the next couple of days.

[ Edited by: kahalakruzer 2018-02-26 15:02 ]

Looking forward to seeing your progress.

SOunds like a fun project!

Your boss lets you build a bar at work.....sounds like my dream job!

Taking applications?

howlinowl

OJT
:)

Very cool. Sounds like a lot fo fun! Thanks for coming back to share this with us!

I found a few more photos of the bar in the warehouse at various stages. Nothing too spectacular, but you'll get the idea.

And here's the start of the actual bar. I wanted to go with kind of a nautical theme on this one. The top and base of the bar are made of glued up pine boards, burned, brushed and varnished, and the center structure is just a nice finish plywood that I stained and varnished. I wanted to make the bar able to be free floating if needed, so it's actually more of a double sided bookshelf. That way we're able to showcase items/merchandise things that we've got for sale. The front posts are the standard railing posts from Oceanic Arts, and the back are 4x4's that I wrapped with about 500' of line and then shellac'd the hell out of.





You can kind of see how warped the top got after burning and brushing. it came back to really bite me in the ass after I was trying to assemble everything squarely.

I did a rope wrap on the edge of the bar so I could put some pictures and matchbooks on it and pour a bar top resin. After about 2 gallons of resin and four separate pours over 3 days, I still had two matchbooks that had a couple match heads popping out. I figure it adds to the charm... At least that's what I tell people.

Almost all of the photos on the bar are copies of actual pictures that one of the founders of our company took on a world trip in the late 1950's. He went from Hawaii to Tahiti, hopped a boat to Norway then went through Europe down to Africa and hitchhiked from Morocco to South Africa. It's actually the trip that inspired Bruce brown to make the Endless Summer. Obviously some pretty legendary photos and stories involved.

I realized I don't have any finished photos of the actual bar, so we'll have to wait for the final reveal in situ.

[ Edited by: kahalakruzer 2018-02-16 10:14 ]

That's looking mighty fine. The OA tiki posts on the front are cool, and the rope/photos/epoxy bartop turned out really nice. If it's any consolation, the matches look fine to me!

Hey Kahalakruzer, welcome back!!
The Bar at work is awesome. Looks really good! Great idea to add the pics on the top of the trip that spawned it all. Really ties the business together with the story and history. I'm sure your boss, and co-workers, are happy.

Mahalo
TabooDan

That is a great little space to work in and what a cool boss!!! I love the storage room photos. Looking forward to your progress photos.

So I figured I'll try and post all of the prep shots before I post the actual installation of the bar. Spent most of the 15 days building lamps and accessories and cutting trim. I am horrible at stopping while working to document anything, so bear with me on this one. I find myself taking a progress shot and then realize later that I never took a picture of the finished product.

I tried my hand at carving a little PNG inspired board from a redwood scrap that I had laying around.


Here's a little swizzle stick shadow box from the collection.




A few classic hanging lamps I made.





The outrigger lamp. I acquired a huge piece of Tongan tapa cloth from my boss that he had laying around in his garage. The end pieces that don't have much detail ended up being enough to make all of the lamps I had in mind.


I made a little rum crate with some of the scrap wood and slung it up with a killer matched set of block and tackle that I found at an antique store for a great price.






Sconces. The carved piece didn't end up making it into the bar, but the second version I made did. That's the clam shell on the shipwrecked looking wood that says Hobie.


Laying out the trim design. Free handed this Maori inspired design ( I think I saw something like it at OA at some point) and then ran a router to it. That was a full day work, so I enlisted some help to burn and brush everything before paint and varnish.


The finished product. All 160 feet of it.

I really dug this panel from 'The Art of Tiki'. It came out of a Trader Vic's. I had a 1'x12' that I found in a dumpster that would fit perfectly over the concrete outcropping in the middle of the room.


Here it is finished. Basically cut the faces in half and alternated them down the board. Free handing them only took a few minutes. That's one of the things I love about tiki stuff. You can get reeeeeal loose on the drawing part of it. I routed it, painted the recessed areas brown, sanded the sloppiness out of it, and then painted the rest with an acrylic paint and did a little brown wash over it to age it. I loved how much of a statement this thing made with only a few hours of work.

I found this canoe prow at an antique store and immediately knew I wanted to make an A-frame with it. Not sure of it's age or origin, but it reminded me of a PNG piece from one of my old primitive art books.


The unstained boards at the bottom were just used to stabilize the piece for transportation. I ended up having the angle all wrong when I went to install, so the whole piece ended up being cut down a bit to clear one of the trusses on the ceiling.

If you couldn't tell by the amount of pictures with our company logo in the background, I'll make it even easier for you. Here's a Witco World Map inspired piece that was poached from our warehouse and ended up being used in the shop.

Holy moly! You don't go in for half-measures, do you? Those pieces look amazing and you haven't even put the damn thing together yet! I have to admit to a small degree of envy--what takes you a few a few hours to complete would take me a few days, at best!

Seriously, fantastic work on the lamps, the decor, the carvings, all of it!

Wow, hella cool!!

Love how much work you are putting into getting all those personal touches in.

Definitely can't wait to see the final result.

Dang
Someone had a Red Bull or 40
Strong work bruddah
Looking forward to more pics

Thanks guys for all of the compliments. This whole project couldn't have been done without the wealth of knowledge everyone's freely bestowed for all of these years on Tiki Central.

So, finally came the day where I was actually able to start installing the bar. I had 3 days to get it done before the store opening, and when I showed up, there was still half a wall of wood missing. Needless to say, the construction crew helped out by furring out some plywood on the back wall so I had a giant mounting surface instead of trying to get everything attached to the concrete. With the amount of stuff going up on the back wall, that turned out to be one of my best ideas yet. Sometimes, even the sun shines on a dog's ass I guess.



So here was the bare canvas. All that ply was mounted 3/4" off of the wall to give the screws some leeway once they went through the 3/4" plywood.




After a long day of cutting and pushing stuff around to accommodate the rest of the construction going on in the store, I finally got all of the matting on the walls.



Here are a few detail shots at the end of day one. I looked down and realized it was 10:00 at night and I was still running an air compressor and nailing up bamboo and trim. The city of Laguna Beach can get a little huffy over stuff like that, so I decided to call it a night.

Making me thirsty

On one of the nights after work, I had the idea to make my own version of an Asmat ancestor skull. I have a wheelbarrow full of concrete skulls on the side yard that I cast for a flaming-skull-lava-rock-fire-pit thing we do at our yearly luau, so I grabbed one of those, some craft concrete and dye, and some cowry shells and went to work. As tempting as it was to go out back and cut the actual tusks from my pet pig in the back yard, I made the boar tusks out of scrap wood.



After everything was cemented on and glued up, I ran a mix of paint and shellac over it all to give it some definition and aging. I still need to make a shelf for it, but seeing as it weighs a ton, I need to do some actual engineering to ensure that it doesn't come down on some unfortunate passerby. As of now it just sits on the bar top in the store.

And here's the day two installation. I got all of the trim up, all of the bamboo up, a coat of varnish over everything, and as you can see, the A-frame installed. I forgot to get pictures before, but I made the puffer in fish float lamp with a cool hand made glass float that I found with a perfect hole cut in the top already. I had to remember how to tie up the netting, but got it all worked out eventually. Bringing back my early tiki days.

As you can see, none of the doorways had actual doors in them. I found out on day two that neither of the side doorways were going to have doors installed. That became a bit of a conundrum. The back wall was going to have a door, but it just had to be designed...and built...and installed...and decorated...and it all had to be done by the end of the next day. Needless to say, I wasn't getting much sleep that night.

Love your skull creation, I might just use the idea on my skulls in the backyard.

Wait, you put a puffer lamp inside a glass float? Dude, that's hard core!

WOW! All I can say is wow....

Super cool. The skull look authentic. Wendy

Wow, really incredible work. Can't wait to see more progress pix as it comes together. :)

Cheers,

Jeff

So here's the finished product. I knew I only had 3 days to finish the whole build, so this was gonna be the long day. I had coated everything with a water based spar varnish on night two, so all I had to do on day three was button up some loose ends with the trim, get all of the light switches and outlets covered in tapa, get a door built/installed/decorated, hang all of the thatch, fireproof everything and decorate. Obviously it took longer than expected, but after a 16 hour day, it all came together.



Here's the thatch all done up. I ended up making a last minute decision to cover the concrete wall over the trusses with thatch. It gave a nice look like being inside of a hut that I didn't think about prior. I'd love to say I planned everything to lay out as it did, but that would be a huge lie. My entire concept was scribbled on an Oceanic Arts notepad 5 minutes before the owner showed up to talk about the project. Once again, the reason I love tiki stuff. You can keep it real loose.

Here's the finished door. It was built (not by me,luckily) from old mill cut lumber that came out of the ceiling trusses. The contractor that built it got it looking so good from the start, that I didn't even finish the lumber with stain or varnish. It turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the bar just knowing how much work went into it. Finished it with some matting, bamboo trim and a PNG mask and door pull from OA, and called it a day.

Here's the finished bar. I ended up trimming out the shelves with some bamboo, but it basically looks the same as when it was at the warehouse. I even drew a real rough design of how I wanted the actual bar to look before I started construction, which was big for me. I wish a still had the drawings just to compare. I think they all ended up being used to clean glue off of my hands during construction. As you can see, my concept of shelving the front of the bar has been put to use as retail space.

Here's a cool piece that the owner had in his house. One of the old place-mats from the Royal Hawaiian that was given to him as a gift by the original owner Francis Cabang a few years before the restaurant's (first) closing in the early 2000's. This one's gotten pretty sun faded, but he's got a few more stashed away that we may swap out one day. This picture also shows my biggest mistake of the whole job. Before I put up all of the art, I fireproofed all of the walls and thatch with a flame retardant. The next day when it had all dried, there were hard white spots all over everything. It's most noticeable on the dark trim and A-frame beams, but if you look closely, it's everywhere. I have no idea why it ended up drying white and spotty...maybe because of the varnish I had done under it, or maybe I didn't shake it up. If anyone's ever had this happen to them, I'd be interested in hearing about it. I think it'll haunt me for a while.







Day time detail shots.




Night time vibe shots.

Well that's it. Unlike most home bars, you don't need an invitation to check this one out. It's in our Hobie store in downtown Laguna Beach, and can be seen any time the store is open. And for the surf history nerds, there's also a cool little museum exhibit in the store that was done in conjunction with the Surfing Heritage and Cultural Center out of San Clemente. It delves into local Laguna Surf History, the story of our founder Hobie Alter and all of his innovations in surfing and sailing, and a forefather of the retail surf shop, Dick Metz who was basically the first guy to ever think of selling merchandise besides surfboards in surf shops. If you come by to see it all in person, he's the guy who graces the top of the bar with his world travels and exploits.

As always, a tiki bar is never finished, so I'll post updates when I inevitably start tweaking things. I've already planned on adding a mug shelf somewhere at the insistence of my boss. Hey, working for a family run company definitely has it's benefits...

[ Edited by: kahalakruzer 2018-02-26 15:04 ]

That turned out great - and in just three days!? Amazing.

I applaud your efforts. To go from zero to 60 in such a short amount of time, you must've been channeling the ghost of Bamboo Ben! And he's not even dead yet!

Strong and fast work
Cheers

Wow, that turned out fantastic!!

Regarding the fireproofing spots, I've noticed some spots on some lampac that I hung on the ceiling, but they're almost greasy and I think I could wipe them off if I tried. But they're more clear than white...I think it's the fireproofing beading up over the stain I had applied. Sounds like yours reacted to another treatment.