Bar Project

It's been a very busy month and I've been wanting to post on several topics for over a month.  Now that I have some time off, I'm going to catch up with several all at once.

My buddy Derek bought a new house recently which has a nice built-in wet bar in the living room. Since it shared a wall with the garage Derek had an idea to run draft lines through the wall and install his draft towers directly on the bar top.  Sounded like a damn good idea to me so I took it as a project to help him out. 

Below is a photo of what we started with.  It's not the best photo but it's the only one I had.  The bar top and backsplash were covered in lovely white 1970's formica and the sink (covered by cardboard boxes in the photo) wasn't attached to the countertop.

The renovation plan included replacing the bar top and backsplash with maple and finishing it with a thick coat of epoxy so it looks like a commercial bar.  We decided to remove the formica backsplash but not the bar top since Derek wanted the job to get finished in less than a month...

I went with laminated maple strip flooring for the top and 3/4" soft maple to trim out the front edge and make a new backsplash.  The flooring was glued directly to the formica then wrapped with the maple boards to finish the carpentry. Holes were cut in the top to reinstall the sink and place the draft towers.  The beer lines were run under the counter and directly though the wall into the garage through a collar we added to Derek's kegerator. 

The epoxy proved to be a bit of a challenge since it doesn't flow like typical oil based finishes but after 2 coats (and quite a bit of sanding) it came out quite nice.  Below are two photos of the finished bar.  The epoxy ended up placing as 3/16" layer of high gloss clear protection over the maple.