My wife and I recently bought an old house. It is gorgeous, built like a fortress, and quite large. It also needed every ceiling replaced, a new bathroom, wiring, etc. During the course of my remodeling, I sold our current home for roughly twice what we paid for it, so time became a real factor in getting everything done. A very good friend offered to come over and help a bit since he was laid off and getting bored. He's a Laborer by trade, so he can do almost anything and has been working me like a dog to get things ready. I really owe him for the work he's done, it has been above-and-beyond the boundaries of normal friendship.
So, since he's a bit of a drinking man, and since he's been talking about building a bar for a few years, I'm going to knock out a portable one for him as a Christmas gift. It's going to be the typical raised panels and brass rails kind of affair. I plan to put it on casters similar to what we used to see on the road cases we used to haul in the music business. Portability is important because you never know when you need to take your bar with you for a special occasion like getting kicked out of the house, doing a wedding, a wake, or sipping a couple of cold ones and watching a meteor shower in the back yard.
Has anybody got any details they've used on a job like this that they were especially happy with? Any thoughts on materials or methods you have used in the past would certainly help keep the creative process running wild. I'm thinking a small fridge would be nice, maybe an ice bucket, perhaps a tap, lockable storage for the good whisky he enjoys, space for the rare plastic gallon jug of elixir that still comes out of some of the hollers around here. He's got this fixation with hanging his wine glasses over the bar, so I'll have to come up with a solution for that. It all depends on what I can scrounge.
The last bar I built was about two feed wide and five feet long. It felt comfortable and was the center of many evenings when it was time to put the motorcycles away. It had a coffee maker on one end, my brew of choice, and a nice bit of storage underneath. The top was carpeted, which meant it reeked of alcohol, tobacco and firearms by the end of the weekend many times. It made a really great bonfire when the time came to move out of that little place.
Personally, I'll never have another bar in my house, but if he wants one then I'll be happy to see he gets it.
Jim