The Free Bar!

On Saturday morning, we got up early and dropped the kids off at our neighbors’ house. We borrowed the neighbors’ truck, and drove up to pick up our free bar. We really had no idea what it would look like, and I was nervous when we saw the bar stools in the garage. They’re a modern-ish black padded circle with bright metal base. You can see them below. But when we got to the basement to see the bar, it wasn’t all that bad. We’re not huge fans of the black formica top, but the rustic barnwood is actually pretty nice.

A good look at the bar stool, and the barnwood front of the bar. We went ahead and stained the wood already, which you can see on the trim piece directly under the countertop. As you can see, it matches the baseboard along the wall pretty well.

Lots of storage room along the back. We’ll probably stick a wine rack in there, and I’ll move my beer glasses down there as well. I probably will have to put something up to prevent Evan from getting in there though. The little guy is crawling around and now standing up without holding on to anything. He also thoroughly enjoys pulling things apart and throwing stuff.

As you can see, the bar is pretty solidly built, and all wood too, no cheap paneling. Oh, what I would have given for some cheap, light paneling. That thing was a bitch to get up those stairs. Lisa was pushing from the bottom while I pulled from the top. The catch was that immediately at the top of the stairs, we had to make a 90 degree turn. We spent probably a good 20-30 minutes trying to angle the bar out the top of the stairs, tilting it up and down, until I was finally able to squeeze it through another door. From there, we carried it out the back door and flipped it over and over through the backyard and out to the truck. Getting it in the truck was actually pretty easy. And getting it down our stairs wasn’t too hard either, since ours is a straight shot down instead of a tight angle.
So we have some tweaking and rearranging to do downstairs, but the good news is that we now have extra seating down there for Evan’s birthday party coming up this weekend! And I have one less project to do.