FLEA MARKET: Now Dat's One Whoop A$$ Bar

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Now Dat's One Whoop A$$ Bar

If you're going to have a can of Whoop A$$ Peanuts...you'd better have a heck of a bar to serve them on! And you'd better not hesitate...or you're a damned fool!! Mae West said it best!

After aquiring this door...thank goodness for store owners who call before discarding...I spent a bit of time scratching my head wondering what best I could accomplish with it. This was not your typical door. Once a store front entrance, this door was grande...and HUGE. It stood extra tall, was extra thick (almost 3 inches), had an enormous beveled glass window, and took THREE adults to get it out of the basement of the store in which it once resided.

It was fabulous.

But maybe a tad unsightly.

So I went to work. Starting by removing some of the hardware and stripping off the old layers of paint.

A little less green...a little more wood!

By this time the door had spoken to me like only junk does, and a vision of a bar was rolling around in my brain.

It was going to take more than the door to make a bar, so I pulled out the heavy wood sides of an upright piano that had been waiting for it's turn at a new life. The veneering was not in good condition so had to be scraped off, and the wood had to be sanded down for staining.

The stripping, the scraping, the sanding...by now the bar was worth about a gazillion bucks in sweat equity. And there was lots more to be done!

I really felt my creation needed a fabulous focal point. Think, think, think. Yes...etch a name right into that awesome beveled glass window.

"Bar"? too plain

"Wine and Spirits"? too fancy

"Social"? only my silly family would "get" that one

"Saloon"? PERFECT!!

So I went on a search for the perfect font to fit the name, then graphed it out on a sheet of paper so I could graph it larger on contact paper for etching the glass. (this was in my pre-projector days)

It took a bit of time to get the graphing drawn bigger, apply the contact paper to the glass, then cut out the wording with an exacto knife. Then after the etching cream had been on long enough I had dear hubs help get the door out where the etching cream could be rinsed off with the garden hose. Love. The. Results. !

Now time to stain all the wood a warm, dark walnut. Then protect with polyurethane. OK, I'm thinking it needs to be several gazillion bucks by now and I'm not even close to being done! Oofda.

The entire time I'm working on the door and the piano pieces...my mind continually wanders further into the project to determine the best route to finish it.

This is a constant for Junker Fixer Upper People. We don't often just automatically start and finish a project. They're usually a work in progress and as we move along the ideas keep flowing. Some get tried and tossed by the wayside.

For instance, the bar needed a TOP. How about another door? Ok, I tried a few I had around. Nope. I just wasn't feelin' it. Then I remembered some old lumber I had around...ahhh, perfect.

I also added some half porch posts to the front, the patina they added was FAB!

Some glass shelves and a wine glass rack on the back side for perfect display and storage. And the bar was assembled with brackets, making the heavy beast perfectly portable by simply separating into sections.

What do you think???

Would anyone like to see another bar at JunkFest? We've had several varieties and no two will ever be alike! Perhaps another will be conjoured up from the junk piles.....

And did I charge several gazillion bucks for the bar? No, I did not. It was a labor of love and I am SO happy with the results. It's by far one of my proudest junk feat moments, and I wanted the new owners to be happy with their new bar...and it's price!