First Time Homemaker: Setting the Bar

After we moved in to our new-old house, we were really excited to start the fun projects. The most successful one thus far (I think), is the bar in the kitchen. We talked forever about what we could use as the bar, and wanted to recycle something. We thought about barn wood, but we don't have any barns. We did have a ton of extra hardwood flooring, though! The old hardwood from the patch in the bedroom was in a pile in the basement. Could that work? Yeah, maybe.

First, the before pictures. The bar between the kitchen and the dining/living room was on the accent wall. With the kitchen coming around, the absence of the bar made the whole thing look really unfinished.

We also wanted to match the half wall above the basement stairs. But, we were kind of sad to cover it up. Apparently this piece of wood used to be in some kind of bar/hang out spot. It was covered in names and phone numbers from, well, who knows when?

Who are these people?!

So. Step one was to cover both walls with the shape of the bar/covering. We also added supports underneath.

The wax paper was added so that we could paint these braces later. The idea came from Phillip, when we put up the interior door trim. We figured the same thing would work for this. It did.

The next step was to add the hardwood and nail it in with the nail gun. The nail gun is totally my favorite tool to use. It always makes me feel like a badass.

Gettin' it.

Worked on the other wall, too.

The best thing about using hardwood floor on the wall and the bar was that it was really easy to do. We just picked the pieces and made sure they looked randomly placed. When a piece was too big, I'd just ran out to the garage and saw it in half. The only hiccup was matching it on the edges.

Tricky.

For the first picture, we had to rip a piece of hardwood in half using a table saw. For the second, we had to get rid of part of the corner using the Rockwell saw. I started counting how many different saws we used on this project, and it was ridiculous.

1. Miter Saw

2. Circular Saw

3. Jig Saw

4. Table Saw

5. Rockwell Universal Saw

Considering I didn't even know that there were this many different kinds of saws before we got this house, I did pretty well.

Next, we had to sand and stain the bar. We used the same stain as we did on the actual hardwood.

Matching: Check.

Though it looked awesome, we still weren't finished. We trimmed both spaces with boards using 45 degree angles on the corners. (Also, I know how to do that now.)