Post #650426 by lunavideogames on Sat, Sep 1, 2012 6:32 PM

My wife and I moved into a house just over 2 years ago now. We have a garage that we do not store cars in, so right away I wanted to make it into some kind of a finished room. It was pretty ugly when we moved in, the old owner had used all of the cabinets from the kitchen in the garage. The walls were pieced together with cheap particle board that was mismatched all over in small pieces. I had some bad pictures, but they were in an unsupported format so I can't upload them yet.

About a year ago we decided it should be a Tiki Bar, so we started to renovate the walls and started to pull out the old shelving. It was a big ordeal and took us awhile to accomplish. Of course everything takes longer than expected when building a Tiki Bar, especially in laid back beach communities. But we got our friends to pool our resources and made it happen. My friend Kelly came over and wired up 5 new outlets and places for 3 lights. Then my friend Bill came by with his skills and got the walls all put up.

By this time it was well into spring. But I could finally start doing things on my timeframe. So we started to paint the walls. We chose blue as our backdrop color. I know most Tiki Bars are brown, but just wait and see where I go with this before too much judgement.

I had been buying little pieces here and there, mostly off Craigslist. I bought a bar and took off the top part. Then I put bamboo fencing around the bottom. After that I sanded down the top to get it ready to be refinished (which I haven't finished yet).

After we were done painting, I used pieces of bamboo to frame the window and door.

It was beginning to look like a Tiki Bar but not quite there yet. I got a nice bamboo shelf for next to nothing off CL to put my rum on. I secured it to the wall so that my $500+ rum collection doesn't come smashing down in the first earthquake. And we slowly started to throw up some tiki decorations.

I got two bamboo bar stools of CL for $20 for both I think. They are nice and they swivel. We already had a freezer out there so I found a little fridge as well off of CL. Also bought 2 volcano bowls, 3 pineapple mugs and 17 Orchids of Hawaii mugs with the tiki fork and spoon for $40 off CL as well.

We have made multiple trips to Oceanic Arts and Tikiland here in SD. I also found lots of floaters and random things for really cheap at Ocean Beach Gifts and Shells. I am sure we will make many more trips to get everything that we need. We purchased a Blowfish lamp in Hawaii as well as some Tiki totems. Sorry that there are not a lot of Tikis pictured, we have quite a few but they are shy.

We cleaned it out to make way for the flooring. The floor was our most expensive part yet.

Yup, we put fake grass in our garage. I think it really ties the room together. So now that it is over 50% complete and starting to have a good vibe to it.

More decorations and lights are up and I finally was able to move the rum onto the shelf.

[ Edited by: lunavideogames 2013-04-08 17:42 ]