Ed's BruHaus is officially open ....

I got to spend most of last week out in the garage since Melissa didn't have the gas money to make it over to Knoxville. Luckily, early in the week Dad and I had *finally* gotten over to Lowe's -- we've been talking about getting materials for me to build a bar "forever".

So now I had the materials, had the plans, and ... the time! Friggin' weather though. Yes, I was out in the garage but with three days of temperatures in the low 30s as a high, the stain took much longer to dry. I planned on doing a two-tone type setup with some dark (colored) wood as the base and a lighter color to edge it with.

Two coats of stain and three coats of shellac on the baseboard took 3 days to prep. I also was using liquid nails to hold the laminate on the bar top and shelf tops which also took a couple days. This friggin' bar is only 4' long but yet it will take the better part of a week to construct. Yeesh!

So after the front, sides, top, and shelves were "ready", I could finally start putting it all together. However, the laminate didn't really adhere as consistently as it should have and there are air pockets.

I am unsure if that was partly due to the weather or maybe that I didn't put enough weight on the full surface to keep the surface of the wood in touch with the surface of the laminate and allow the adhesive to do its job. However, there was little that could be done about it now.

I trimmed the excess laminate off, and did so somewhat haphazardly. Had I been thinking, I would've minimized the waste. Hindsight is 20-20 though.

After the laminate was cut I could start securing the shelves and bartop. This went pretty smoothly. Then it was time to cut the edge boards. I decided I wanted to utilize some of the tools to make it look better than just slapping butt joints together, so I used the router to cut a profile on the inside edge of the boards and mitered the corners to give it a better 'look".

The mitering came out pretty well. I was pretty impressed since I have never really tried doing that before. All the pieces came out really close, so I was pretty happy with that.

However, the routing didn't go as smoothly. I'm not sure if the router wasn't powerful enough, the boards were too hardwood for it or the bit, or maybe it was just  a "cheap" bit. I cut a 5/8" ogee profile and had to fight each board through the router as it would constantly bog down.

Well, all but the first piece anyway. I learned to turn that variable speed down after the router ripped the first board out of my hands and slung it across the shop. Luckily, I didn't get hurt and the piece was still usable, but  it was interesting for a second there. I swear when that board took off it looked like a scene out of "Home Improvement".    ; )

So now with my speed adjusted down where it's not wanting to rip the piece out of my hands, it keeps trying to bog down. There was no happy medium. So I slowly fed the pieces in and I swear my hands were tingling from vibration by the time I finished with the longer pieces.

I finally got all the edging pieces cut and routed, nailed in place, stained, and applied two coats of polyurethane. Luckily, the cold spell had moved on and by now it is in the 60s so it didn't take near as long for these to dry and cure.

Well again if I had thought about it, I could have used the laminate on the serving side of the bar. Originally I was thinking I would just tack a sheet over it so that I could keep my beer that I am storing protected from light, but when I started noticing some of the pieces of laminate that I would just be throwing away, it hit me (now that they are cut up in "too small" pieces) that I could use that on the serving side.

Belly up to the bar ...

Cheers!