Have bar, will travel....

We have a most magnificent vintage bar that we acquired from my stylish and fabulous friend Anne (former proprietor of No Lemmings Allowed). I'm pretty sure that her handy husband Sam made the kidney-shaped top as he used to make custom tables in the same shape. We held a joint garage sale when we were neighbors and when she didn't sell the bar she basically just let me have it. It was stashed in the basement at the old house and has spent the last year in the entry room of the new house, but our little basement project seemed tailor-made to create a new home for the bar. It fits ever so nicely in the back corner of the room. I reupholstered the chairs to go with the decor. And I have grand plans to decoupage the bar top with vintage travel images and luggage tags.
Eric and I created the shelf in the background that houses our vintage and travel barwear. I'll find a better pic that shows that off. We even cleared out some cabinet space in the kitchen by bringing the booze bottles down and we're loving the ledge for storage.

Eric saved the original back porch light in the renovation. He repainted the casing, rewired it with a light switch and mounted it to the rafter for more work light behind the bar. It's awesome and I love it! All of the ducts will eventually be painted with chalkboard paint so our visitors can "graffiti" the place up too:

Bar shelf and bar stools finished.

Once the shelf was assembled I stained and polyurethaned it. This photo gives a better look at the decorative trim I put on the shelf to fancy it up:
With Eric's expertise we then put the shelf on the ledge (a near perfect fit) and stabilized it by attaching the whole thing to the beam in the ceiling in several places. Then for the fun part, filling it up with our glassware collection:

Next up was to recover the bar stools to better match the room. Here's the gaudy art deco fabric that has been gracing them for the last half decade (my doing, I admit):

I removed two layers of past upholstery and discovered the original vinyl covers in pretty good shape underneath it all:

Really cool, but didn't match the decor, so I recovered them in some canvas we picked up at JoAnn Fabrics that matches the curtain a little better:

An voila! Two barstools updated in under an hour. Next project, to refinish the bar: