Fort Awesome

This article has been literally months in the making. That is, I wrote a couple of paragraphs in October and forgot about it.

If you’re in the loop (or you’ve looked round our house as prospective renters), you’ll know that one of the cool things we’ve been wasting our time on is turning our tiny spare room into a tiny bar. Think Changing Rooms vs. Pimp My Ride vs. Commando vs Terminator. Imagine that! Arnie versus himself! Of course, Chuck Norris would ultimately win. But I digress (I dye cress!). Like many things, it was a comment made in jest that went a few steps too far. We documented the demise of our good judgement and the creation of something awesome in a small space. When you see the final result, you will probably want one of your own, possibly. Guaranteed!

Inexplicably, the landlord didn’t seem to mind.

You may as well see the final product now. I was debating (with myself) over whether to show it at the end, to make for dramatic wonderment, but there is enough of that in the world in expensive films about hobbits, and also Neighbours. This bar is made entirely from straight lines, by the way, and all angles are perpendicular (although actually, they aren’t quite, but don’t tell the Woodwork Mafia). The photo is a wide-angle shot, because the room’s so small and that was the only way to get everything in view.

How the hell did we make this? Good question. Like many things, it all started as a drunken idea by Dan which went a step too far. This was followed by another drunken night in, involving Jeff and Dan and some paper and a pencil, and their minds:

(can’t quite find it among my junk at the moment. imagine a crude drawing of some rectangles with also a picture of some chips and a wolf underneath it. bear with me)

I have yet to decipher the markings. Moses got equally confused and decided to depict the relationship between a bag of chips and a wolf’s head, which probably sums up the situation quite well and makes more sense to me. Armed with this vital sheet of measurements, we drove to Wickes, which is a wonderful place full of raw materials. You could basically build a house if you bought enough stuff from Wickes. Actually I didn’t check that they sold bricks, but you could certainly build a dashing log cabin. We settled for a quantity of wood and nails, and also some tools we were missing. It is also very important, if you wish to make a bar like ours, that you buy blue polypropylene rope. We will be needing this throughout the project so please, buy plenty of this. I really can’t stress this enough. We bought twenty metres of it just to be safe.

If you can find rope that has an absurdly manly word like IRONMONGERY emblazoned across it, then all the better.

Sawing was done. Much sawing. Followed by hammering and nailing. And much rejoicing. The real brunt of the putting-bits-together was done by the venerable Jeff, who put in many man-hours, which come to think of it is a pointless term when talking about only one man. He put in many regular hours. Yes.


Much sawing.

Before long, we had a wooden frame, and some flat bits, and if you sort of balance them together it looks pretty good. But as the Bible says, before nailing, comes varnishing, as it allows for easier painting. When carpenting it’s always beneficial to stop and think, “What Would Jesus Do?” because he was a carpenter, according to the stories. If you’re following along, make sure you have your blue polypropylene rope to hand before you start, or you may get in a bit of a tizz later on.Varnish is a sticky substance made from compressed emu fat. It only works if the emu is in a state of mild confusion when compressed, so if you’re making your own, bring a collection of difficult puzzles. A spinning bow-tie is ideal as emus don’t have a fucking clue what is going on there. Just watch out that you don’t accidentally hypnotise a nearby friend, and certainly don’t compress him.

So now our wood is dark brown and shiny. Not at all unlike that of an old English pub; just replace “solid construction” with “rickety bodge job”.

More nailing was done…

And it was together. Outside! In the back garden! Shit. It’s supposed to be upstairs. Through great luck, and using the same 3d rotation logic that those kinds of puzzles in newspapers were obviously preparing us mentally for, we managed to twist it round corners and up the stairs, sliding through the doorframe with just enough space that you might think we had measured it exactly to fit. We hadn’t of course, you know us better than that. Don’t you? You should. I certainly can’t imagine how we’d have got it up there if we hadn’t had some blue polypropylene rope handy at all times.

Decoration

So we’ve got a bar. It’s great. but it lacks character, and all the other crap that bars have. What do other bars have?

• Funny coloured lights.
• Bar stools.
• Optics
• Random stuff that gets stuck up on the walls for that “authentic feel”

Optics are those things that you mount bottles upside down in, and serve shots into a glass. You know. Yes, you do. When looking for random stuff like this, in this day and age we are blessed with the virtual junkyard that is eBay. Jeff’s at-the-time unemployed status gave him plenty of time to find things like a really old collection of vintage beer mats, which look great blu-tak’d to the wall and probably result from years of collecting by the previous owner, but we have so many we just use them as regular coasters. They look cool. You look cool too. Did I never tell you?

We also found a rotating 6-bottle optic thingy, which is very good, if a little leaky sometimes. We just position Sam’s mouth below the drips, which calms him down greatly. Two birds with one stone! Also we throw stones out of the window to kill birds. We don’t, of course, I was making a joke. Try it with your favourite idiom or proverb!

At this time the bar is actually just all balanced together, and could fall apart at any time! But Jeff is a man of action, he likes to live on the edge. Or lean on the edge, of a bar.

The Bar: Reloaded

So what future is there for The Bar? Well, now that we’re all hard-working, money-earning yuppies with nothing else to do, we’re moving on to new pastures. Hopefully pastures with a larger spare room. And a dining room! Yeah. We are looking forward to having a house that looks like real adults might possibly live in it. But wherever we go, you can be sure we’ll be dismantling The Bar somewhat, shoving it up somebody’s (my) car, and driving it, to some place where we live.

I really am glad we spent all that money on twenty metres of blue polypropylene rope on a whim. It really was extremely useful.