Biding Time

There hasn't been any riding going on lately, due to the shoulder surgery thing. But in an effort to keep somewhat active with the posting; here’s what’s been accomplished on the basement project over the cold winter months.

Where did we last leave things on that? I believe the walls were plastered, the bathroom shower was tiled, a pellet stove was waiting to be installed, and the rough makings of a bar were taking shape, yes?

Since the construction phase was completed, the next step was to get beadboard up and painted. I’ve got some pics showing the progress on that, so let’s pick one. Any one. Ok; the bar!

Here, you can see the beadboard, prior to painting. And. we can see the BAR! It’s looking GOOD! All framed in, beadboarded, and tiled around the bottom where the stools and other traffic will be. Nicey-nice!

Here’s a close-up of the tile; notice the brass edging along the corner edge – now that’s sharp! (I’d like to take credit for that, but it was my tile guys’ idea.)
Here’s a shot of the back of the bar. The counter will hold a sink when things are all done, there’ll be storage space where the shelves are, and the opening on the left (behind the manhole cover) will be where the bar fridge goes. (Here, you can get a good shot of the initial paint color of the walls. I then added a faux-finish on top of this and those pics follow in a bit…)
Painting the beadboard. What a royal f’ing pain in the ass this was. All those grooves!
The paint didn’t want to cooperate at all and despite trying different methods of getting the paint in there, it turns out that rolling over the flat parts first (with a roller) and then going back with a paint brush is NOT the best way. In fact, that way only lends to aggravation by the truckload. The best way is to just load up the roller with paint and splooge the paint into the grooves, then go back with a brush and hit any spots that are clogged, to get them nice and cleaned out.

Huh, whaddya know; we’re back to the bar. Again. (Some might call it a problem, I like to think of it as a hobby.) Anyway, here you can see the first pass that was routered into the bar top. See the bottle cap in the middle? (Its the thing that looks like a dark speck.)
What you may or may not be able to make out is that the first-pass with the router wasn’t deep enough (despite prior discussions and assurances that the proper depth would be adhered to by the person that did the routering). Anyway, as the old adage says; if you want something done right, do it yourself so I borrowed a router and went to work. The only problem was that since since one level had already been removed, I was left with different working heights (the outside edge was higher than what had already been routered). As such, I had to use a wooden jig, spanning the width of the top, to keep the router bit at the right height.

Here’s an action shot…just look at those wood chips fly! Gotta make room for the bottle caps...

Anyway, what do you get when you’re routering line after line after line of wood? Why, you get an impressive pile of sawdust!
And sawdust all over the nice new tiles…
Here’s the final pile. (Please keep all matches away…)
I sanded the hell out of everything and things look good. There are a couple of “Whoops” spots where the router slipped (and some screw holes, too) – they’ll get some tinted wood putty and then you’ll never see the spots (especially if the bottle caps happen to align over them).
Ok, so the whole idea for routering out the bar top is to put the bottle caps in and then polyurethane over them. But before I go ahead and start dumping a permanent epoxy over the hundreds of bottle caps, it’d probably be a good idea to do a couple of dry runs to see how things work. Do air bubbles come out from under the caps? Do the caps slide around when the epoxy is pouring over them? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that I don’t want to find out the hard way. So I’m going to do some test runs, first. And that means I need some routered spots to test with. Voila!
I’ll do a post about how the tests go, but for now, I focused on getting other things wrapped up. Like the afore-mentioned faux-finish on the walls.

Here’s a couple shots of the initial yellow-ish top coat, with the beadboard almost finished.

Here’s one with some different lighting. The beadboard looks decent here, but the top half of the walls look really yellow. Believe me when I say the color was more of a pasty pastel-ish kind of yellow tan. Sort of.
I’ll be honest; I’ve never done a faux finish before and almost chickened out (leaving just the boring, pasty yellow color). But I’d gone down to my local Home Depot and talked to a very nice lady there who took about 45 minutes to walk me through the entire process, so I pretty much HAD to do it then. Good thing I manned-up as it came out pretty good.

(The lighting for these pics isn’t so good, so bear with me.)

Here’s a comparison pic, showing the base color (on the right) and the finished product on the left.
Here’s over by where the pellet stove is going to go.
Here’s a close-up of the texture.
Here’s the finished walls behind the bar.
Here’s a decent shot of the back wall.
(Hey, what are those things leaning up against the tree in the back yard? They look like racks of some sort. Racks that would be used on a fire pit to cook a pig, perhaps? Hmmm…)

That’s about where things are at this point. I went around and painted a second coat onto the beadboard (it needed it in spots) and things are looking sharp.

What else. Oh; the shower hardware was installed in the shower. Now I just need to cut in some tile shelves and get a glass door. (The door is gonna have to wait, though, as the bank account is reeling at the moment and I need to give it some time for the bleeding to ease up.)
Progress will be slow going from this point, due to the shoulder, but I’ll see what else I can accomplish by the time the pig roast gets here.

As for the shoulder itself, it seems to be coming along well. I’ve got my first follow-up appt on Thursday, so well see what the doc says.

Think he’d be upset if I showed up on the bike?