O'Ghoulihan's Fugu Lounge, Tucson, AZ

Wow - what a score!

Fantastic job you have, Enjoyed seeing the progress especially your use of EVA foam

Thank you!

The witco bar is cleaned and waxed. Not much work needed to be done to get it looking good. The stools each had a spot where a dog chewed it a little- sanded that down and it’s barely noticeable. Steamed the cushions, looks a lot cleaner than they did. We might reupholster at some point, but that isn’t in either one of our skill sets.

Certainly an impressive piece!

Absolutely incredible!

This is quickly turning into one of the most exciting DIY threads.

Nice Witco find and restore, too. (Yes, Howard's Feed n Wax is the thing to use. Only other thing we'd ever use on Witco is what TIKIDAVID recommended, Cabot Australian Timber Oil).

Especially love the ceiling work and the way you hid the projector. (No, wait, no 'especially' about it, we love it all!) What's the projector connected to? Our live feature wall is powered by a projector that's plugged into a laptop, but in order to ceiling mount the projector and free up space, we're looking for a more compact solution than a laptop wired into it with a three foot cord.

Thanks Mike and Marie! Our projector is connected to an Apple TV- we will occasionally watch movies in the lounge. Not sure that’s a good solution for you though. If you’re playing a custom file of sorts, a type of media player might be best. But I can’t say for sure.

Appreciate your kind words as well. We do have some upgrades coming in the near future that I’ll post here!

There was a lot to take in over those three pages but all of it was great stuff. That's a great looking room you've got going on there.

Thanks swizzle. It’s been a lot of work but a lot of fun.

Just ran across this thread and it is so super awesome.The results look great. Wish I could see it in person.

GROG, if you’re ever in the DC area you are welcome to visit. Just let me know!

Congrats on the bar--it looks amazing.

Can the rest of us come with GROG...?

Absolutely! Hamo, the more the merrier.

We were lucky once again to procure another Witco piece locally. I think our luck may have run out… Also gave the closet doors an upgrade. Thin foam for wooden ship doors and foam portholes. This is a little more work, but I much prefer it to the door stickers we used previously.

Another tiki carving from foam. Turned out pretty good and is at least better than the party store stuff. Sort of a mash up between a tiki we saw at Trader Vic’s and some of Tiki Diablos work.

Really great build, loving all your foam creations!

Much appreciated. Thank you! This thread died down a bit. We did create a sort of ghost ship wall out of foam a few weeks back. My IG in my profile is where we make most of our updates. Here’s a few pictures:

You are one of the most creative, resourceful build artists I've seen on TC!

Thank you, that is very kind. We make a pretty good team over here most days!

Some really great, imaginative work on this home bar. Very impressed!

Thank you very much. Just when we think we’re finished, a new project seems to materialize.

Been a while since I’ve updated here. This past weekend we put together this window installation. Inspiration taken from the Inferno Room in Indy. XPS foam boards, Govee curtain lights, and a shower curtain. It seems to get the job done. We’re both pretty happy with how it turned out.

b

Maulrat your space is INCREDIBLE! You have a gift my friend. Amazing work on the door, lamps, walls and even the camoflauge of the projector was well done. I am impressed.

Thank you! The girlfriend and myself make pretty good team. Things are getting tight in that room, but somehow we find ideas to cram another project in.

Fantastic and very inspirational! I hope to post my stuff soon. You two have set the bar very, very , high.

Also how does one post pictures on this forum? I only joined today and I can't work out how to post images on this thread? Cheers anybody?

Hi, Cecil! - To add pictures, look below the white box where you type your text. There's a line below the big white box you're typing in that says:

Attach files by dragging & dropping or by clicking here.

If you click on where it says "clicking here," you can add a file from your computer/phone.

Cheers!

And - Dig the additions, Maulrat!

Thank you both bamalamalu and Cecil. Much appreciated.

Wow, you guys really have some crazy talent and ingenuity! It is amazing to see you start with such a blank canvas and then build it up to such a level of detail. Great ideas throughout to inspire. I also can't believe you gave up your primary bedroom for the bar -that's commitment!

Thank you! We’re really just need the bed to fit, and the larger was more suited for the lounge. Best decision we’ve made!

Here’s our sawfish rostrum made using XPS foam. There’s a reel on our Instagram showing the process. Basically this was carved from a single piece of foam using a Hotwire for the basic shape and lots of rotary tool work for the rest.

Man, if I'd started my own tiki space at the same time as you guys...I'd be 1/100 as far along and the same fraction of quality. Great work, as always.

Amazing! That looks very cool. All I've done lately to my bar is add more mugs, I gotta get back to work on it.

Looking forward to listening to the recent chat with Adrian. The weather is getting a little warmer up here in the mountains, so in the next day or two, I hope to pack a pipe, sit out on the Adirondack, turn it on, and enjoy everything together.

Thanks, Hamo. It was a lot of fun visiting Adrian’s place and being on the podcast.

I really like your bar. I think the best bars are those that are decorated with objects made from scratch. You are very talented with your creativity.

Thanks very much for the kind works. It’s been a lot of fun seeing what we can(and can’t) make ourselves!

Been a while. Any updates?

Hi there. I’ve been pretty bad posting updates here. But it really does mean a lot that you ask! We both got job offers that took us from DC back to our home state of AZ, Tucson specifically. We tore the lounge down, pack it all up and headed west in July! Lots of holes that needed spackling. We won’t use double sided tape again, way worse trying to get that off the walls. Believe it or not, we were able to get our deposit back from the apartment complex. It was a miracle! I would hope that would give others with a temporary/rented space more inspiration to take their space one step further.

As much as we wanted to relocate, we made a lot of friends through the lounge and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

https://www.instagram.com/share/BAAvKXflqg

That bugging-out video on IG is worth a thousand words! Good luck in the new digs!

It was quite mad dash tearing it all down. We had some last minutes visitors on a Saturday with movers coming the following Friday. With that said, moving across country isn’t easy. Settling into new jobs and looking for house- we were ready to have a place we could call our own. After a couple months we found a mid century 3 bedroom rancher. In a similar fashion to the apartment, we decided we would make the primary bedroom into the new lounge. The space is much larger at 13x21’. The vanity sink would make a great back bar as it was conveniently located outside of the restroom. It took a couple of months to get started since we had lots of other house things to get situated first (a lot more work than an apartment!). We tore out the sink and installed a new one along with a fridge. Painted the entire room submarine gray with one part of the ceiling being a very low reflective black paint called Musou black. We have some different theming ideas for some parts of the room. We did recently hang several of our original lamps and almost have 1/4 of the room ready- will certainly post pics once it’s worthy. A few before and after pics below.

The black ceiling will mimic a night sky. Hopefully making the ceiling appear much higher

The actual bar area will have a submarine theme. The utility sink we installed was perfect. The most difficult parts were tearing out the old sink and drilling a hole in the new stainless steel for the glass rinser.

[ Edited by maulrat on 2025-01-16 08:33:30 ]

This is probably the only time we can imagine saying "fantastic news" when someone says they have completely torn down boxed up and removed their most excellent bar, but ... this is really fantastic news!

The old place was an inspiration, the combination of creative application and striking-the-mood was just so right on, so we know the new place will be even better!

We are Witco mavens over here, so we were happy to see Witco represented near the end of your old bar, hope the new one continues that. We loved also picking your brains on your build, we used some advice with the home theater setup and what we now have (projector based, retractable screen) is beyond anything we'd hoped.

Good luck, and can't wait to see how this all turns out.

Thank you again for the kind words! We are aspiring to create the same feeling the old lounge had on a slightly larger scale.

And I hope this doesn’t put us in a bad light. Witco mavens we are not… the bar served us well and we were thrilled to have found. In the end, we decided that we wanted to build the bar a new and not have to necessarily build it around any particular item. Some folks, who I will now call friends, took it off our hands just before the move. You’ll be happy to know they restored the bar and stools to the original fabric very recently. You can see here https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CwCCd66U7/?

Our new build won’t happen over night, but we’re working on it every chance we get!

[ Edited by maulrat on 2025-01-20 10:13:42 ]

Wow, I just scrolled 1.0, the level of creativity and craft there was unparalleled. Can't wait to see what you do with 2.0!

The next step in rebuilding our lounge- never ending twilight . IG reel here https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFZGLJmvhyK/?igsh=MTYwMm9wMndpeW16Yw==

We had a faux window in our previous lounge that was was covering a real window. You can see that further up on this page. It allowed us to block out daylight and have never ending twilight. (posted that on here several months back) The new space doesn’t have windows large anough so we decided to build a partition wall in the middle of the room. Instead of the weathered wood theme used for the previous window, we went with a dilapidated Quonset hut that sustained a blast of sorts allowing for a great view of the volcano in the distance.

Govee curtain for the lights. Polycarb corrugated roof panels, showering curtain screen, pink foam for the mountains. Lots of heating, bending and weathering- only to have most of those details unseen with the ambient lighting. But that’s on brand for us.

Nice work on the tile light, I may have to steal this idea. Also,although it was back a bit, any chance on getting a tutorial on how the other half built the porthole display? Always fun to watch a build that goes from only one or two things and then explodes with color and things to look at.

[ Edited by kalenatiki on 2025-02-15 17:27:29 ]