Many are already pre-cut and ready to be decorated or painted. These were attached with wood glue and clamps. I screwed the do it yourself wood bar 01 into the 2 x 4s of the frame, knowing that I would be adding slats later to cover the screws and the seams. John Everson August 29, at pm. Would love to see what people craft when they take the plunge! Though I yourselg more than I needed to — I used oak in places where I could have used plywood with veneer and saved some money!

Flat piece of wood for main sign. Paints and paint brushes. Wood burning tool. Sealant or shellac spray or can. Work gloves. Paint primer. Other decorating materials. Spraying a Fireplace with Faux Stone Paint.

Applying Paint Sealant to Metal Roofs. Tips for Painting Crown Molding. How to Paint Your Countertops. Tips for Painting a Wooden Bar Stool. Options for Lighting a Basement Bar. Related Posts Removing tile floor and cement board from subfloor. I am demo'ing my bathroom. Read More. Soap bars. I apologize if this isn't the right place to ask this question but I will a There are 3 wooden doors in my studio and I am trying secure them with barr How to make a wooden box square question.

I dont know where to post this so I'll start here. I have a project to bui Related Posts How to make a wooden box square question. How to treat wooden windows? Can somebody recommend me what to do with my wooden windows? How to clean wooden deck? I have a 2 story deck and long walkways to boot.

Then stairs down to the do How to fix wooden kitchen cabinet. Looking for some help with fixing one of my kitchen cabinets. One of our ki Popular Articles. How to Make a Rustic Wooden Sign. Three Ways of Making Wooden Signs. Emboldened that it might actually be possible for someone completely inexperienced like me to do this, I sat down and planned out the dimensions for what I wanted to do for my own project. First, I created some initial planning schematics in Photoshop to visualize my plan.

I chalked out the floor around the old bar so while I had dimensions committed to paper, I would visibly see if something had gone awry from my original plan while I worked. Having a concrete floor at the time and building it in place was definitely a plus. The first step was to build a frame. So you need to plan your frame based on the width of your actual bar top as well as on the ultimate final height. But I wanted my bar top to meet at an 45 degree angle and I wanted the whole bar to feel like a solid piece, so my frame is not divisible.

That also means, my bar can never be disassembled to easily leave my basement. I pity the man who decides to take it apart someday. A lot of people build the bar and then build the additional cabinetry as a separate box that sits behind the bar.

One problem I created for myself… In the last picture above, you can see that I made a smaller cabinet on the left front face of the bar than on the right. I also made the right side a couple inches deeper than the small cabinet, so I could store more things. This came back to bite me in the end, because that meant that the bar top needed to be extra wide to cover one side vs. You also have to plan whether your bar top is going to be edged by some rounded finishing pieces or by true Chicago bar rail.

My dream was to have a bar that really looked like a pro bar… so Chicago bar rail it was. I ordered six-foot lengths from Hardwoods Inc.

Cutting that stuff without pro equipment can be challenging! I screwed the veneer into the 2 x 4s of the frame, knowing that I would be adding slats later to cover the screws and the seams. Since I ended up facing it, I really could have saved a couple bucks there and used oak veneer plywood. For those, I screwed in 1 x 1 oak strips to serve as my shelf support. To cut out the front U opening in the shelves that fits around the 2 x 4 central dividers, I clamped the shelves to the top of the bar frame and used a jigsaw to create the U cut.

These were attached with wood glue and clamps. Then I used 1 x 2 pieces to create a facing lattice on the cabinet insides to hide the seams. These were also glued, with some small finishing nails to hold them in place. Once the cabinet insides were finished, I could finally add the facing boards on the outside. I wanted everything tight, so I tended to cut them slightly large and then shaved them down a hair at a time on the miter saw until the seams all snugged up well.

Once the facing was in place, I began to get the bar top ready. Then I placed the oak rail in place to see how it was going to sit once I began cutting things to size. After I was sure the pieces were going to work, I cut the plywood base for the bar top and screwed that onto my frame. Then I cut the oak for my bar top — in probably the worst way possible!

So I put the two pieces on top of each other in a right angle and clamped them down hard. I also clamped my level —using it as a guide for my saw. My circular saw free-form cut both pieces to make my 45 degree angle. A pretty risky proposition with two expensive pieces of oak. After that stressful cut, I clamped the oak in position, applied wood glue to help lock it to the plywood frame, and screwed the base and top together.

I drilled small holes on the underside of the bar and then screwed up from beneath. Once it was screwed so that it will never, ever, come apart, I sanded the top, especially where the 45 degree seam met. But I made it work.

Watch this key video on YouTube to see how to do this… I watched it many times! It was a wonderful feeling when I took those clamps off the next day and everything was solid and tight!

My existing Makers Mark rubber mat gave me the right dimension for the trough 3. Once I had it all set, I glued and clamped the trough rails in place and screwed them into the support plywood from underneath so no screws show. In the end, I opted to simply varnish the bar, so that plan was unnecessary. Then I faced the inside rail of the bar with two rounded oak veneer pieces. These gave it a finished look and also helped hide the fact that one side of the inside part of the bar stuck out from the frame slightly more than the other!

These were attached with wood glue and a couple small finishing nails to hold them tight while the glue dried since I had no way to clamp them. I sunk the nails below the wood surface and covered them with wood filler.

I actually varied the pattern of the slats between the front and the long side, and like how it turned out. The final building step was to create the cabinet doors. I wanted the side of the bar that you could see walking into the room faced with doors, while I left the other side open. I actually cut them one on top of each other on the miter saw to ensure a matched cut. Then I laid them out on a flat cement floor, glued them and screwed them together.

Luckily I was able to touch up the marks with a Miniwax Stain Marker. Once assembled, I attached the plexiglass I had had cut to size at our hardware store by screwing it in with screen clip holders.

I then removed the plexiglass until after the stain and varnish were done leaving the holder screws in place and attached the doors with three hinges each. I set the doors up on blocks to ensure an equal alignment.

Once the doors were on, it was time to sand and stain. I used both a small power sander and sanding sponges to go over all the visible areas. I started on the inside so that if I hated it, or made any newbie mistakes, I could hide it.

My wife agreed it looked a little darker than we thought, but urged me to press on… and once it dried, it did lighten just a bit, letting the buttery finish show. You put on a paper thin coat and then sand half of it back off?

I brushed on 5 coats of urethane over 4 days. I used fine sandpaper in between the first couple coats and then began using steel wool. Tack cloth helped to make sure the dust all came off. However, the first four coats Do It Yourself Wood Bar 85 of Miniwax Spar Urethane were full of small remnants — it was as if I was painting the bar with a clear coat that included hundreds of grains of sand.

I tried a new can, and got the same result. Finally on the fifth coat, I switched and used Varathane Spar Urethane … and the result was amazing. The urethane went on with a completely different consistency than the Miniwax.

It dried to a beautiful, clear almost speckless coat, and I decided that that was as good as it was going to get. I saw some recommendations to do 7 coats, but I stopped at 5. That coat count, by the way, is for the top. I only went over the sides of the bar twice. A few days after my final coat, the carpet came. It was a wonderful feeling to move that bar finally into position. It had taken over two months… but I had built my own oak home bar!

I had gotten the idea to create a beer tap display to mount on the wall behind the bar. Much as I would have loved to have them, I was not going to run real tap lines through the wall… and then have to clean them every week! Once I had all my taps and tap spigots ready, I took two pieces of oak and cut them to size. Then I glued that board to the larger board, stained and urethaned them, and then used Gorilla Glue to lock my spigots into the holes.

Plus, I had more of my pint glass collection I wanted to display. The length of the thing worrisome — the wall space between the refrigerator and the bar cabinet doors is not a lot. Most people would do this on paper, but I figured all the measurements out using my grid in Photoshop. I used 1. Using actual wine bottles helped me to figure out how much spacing I wanted between the holes. Then I clamped two pieces of wood together and drilled out my holes one piece got the top half of the hole saw, the other piece got the bottom, so I ended up with half circles in each board.

Small 1 x 1 boards were used to hold up the shelves, and then I drilled and glued the rear bottle supports onto the back of each shelf board. I set those in place and slid them out slightly, so that the front wine bottle holders sat on them… then I drilled holes and attached those to the frame and then slid the shelves back inside.

So the end result is, my shelves are removable, if I desire, though they look locked in place. The screws were sunk in below the face of the wood, and I put filler over the top. You can see the circles, but they look like rustic wood plugs instead of visible screws. The top half for the glasses was a very simple box made of 1x4s with a shelf right in the middle of it.

It worked out nicely! For the finishing touch — I snaked Christmas rope lights inside the main bar and tacked them in place with some cable holders. Then I added an easy on-off switch at the end of the extension cord and hid them with a bottle on the lower shelf. It was a long, involved project, one that took up my minimal free time for months… but it was definitely worth doing. The bar looks great. Of course, those of you who follow my work probably know that I do a lot of my writing in bars — and now I have a really comfortable one very close to home.

Pingback: Happy New Year… already? This is better! Good job and thanks for sharing. Thanks Joe! This is unbelievably good. About to try and build a smaller bar for my new log cabin and am too a keyboard worker. Will be referencing this for my own design! Thanks Craig! Come back and post a picture of what you end up building.

Would love to see how it turns out! As previous comments say. Amazing plans and great finished product. I could never find good enough directions to give me the confidence to get started. Hey Ian — I hear you. I searched Google for help over and over again while I was doing mine… which is why I decided to document my every step hoping it turned out and was worth sharing! Looks Great! How has the bar top held up over the years?

Have you noticed any issues doing it your way? The top looks the same now as it did five or six years ago! Good luck with yours! This is awesome! I have been reaearching for months and was about to give up and hire someone to build it for me when I found your blog.

You have inspired me. What a great job you did on your bar project! It is beautiful. I too am need of a L-shape bar for a small space. Roughly how much did building this bar run you? Thanks Kyle! John, did you use concrete nail or anything to fix your bar in place or is it heavy enough that you did not need to worry about that? I have an unfinished basement that I am going to build a bar in as well. I am debating whether or not I should secure it in place.

There are a lot of good ideas and good inspiration from you guys and the others commenting on your posts. Thank you! The tough part was getting it moved into place over carpet once we had the room recarpeted.

I put some small wheeled dollies under it to move it. Though I spent more than I needed to — I used oak in places where I could have used plywood with veneer and saved some money! To minimize glue squeeze out use a brush to spread the glue. If you do get a little squeeze out use a damp cloth to wipe it off before it dries or let it dry and scrape it off and give it a light sanding. John this bar is awesome!

Thanks Kenny! Would love to see what people craft when they take the plunge! To answer your question, the shelves in the door-covered area bar are 12 inches deep, whereas the open section has inch shelves.

Thank you so much for all the detailed steps in making a bar. Hi John, Indeed, an awesome bar. I had the same question as Kenny. What is the depth of your frame? Hi Tim! With all the facing pieces it takes a little math to arrive back at the frame now LOL. But yeah… I went down and measured, and it looks like the larger side has a frame around 16 inches and the smaller around 14 inches.

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