So you love going to bars, but you hate wearing pants. You love a strong dirty martini, or six, but you don’t want to drink and drive. You’ve always wanted to stand behind a bar, holding up wine glasses to the light to see if they’re clean, while drunken friends pour their souls out to you before passing out in the bowl of peanuts, but you hate the idea of working for a boss. Well my friend, provided you are not homeless while reading this, the perfect answer to all of these problems is to build yourself a bar.
The following is a basic DIY guide to transforming that empty basement into the bar of your dreams. Okay, it’s actually a guide so basic that if you follow it your project will haunt your darkest nightmares. The picture above is an example of what happens when you hire professionals who know their way around wood, tools, and tape measures. If you follow this guide your bar will look nothing like this. Enjoy!
The first step is to gather the tools you’ll need, they include the following:
Wood saws
Drill
Screws
Clamps
Glue
Wood finisher
Beer
Actually, we’re already getting way ahead of ourselves here. Your first step is to choose where the bar will go, and exactly what type of bar design you’re looking for. Will your bar require plumbing? Will you be installing refrigerators? Will the bar be straight or L-shaped for a specific corner? For a great list of bar design ideas and for purchasing bar plans visit here. Once you’ve got your plans, you no longer need this article, and to you I wish good luck and happy bartending. But for some of you braver souls who’d like to design your own, you should also seek out the advice of professionals. Okay, so that leaves about 3 of you, who are daring enough to base the future of your home bar project on this guide, which was written by someone who can barely operate a hammer. Well, there’s no turning back now, let’s do this!
Framing
So you’ve got your tools and whole lot of wood. The first thing you want to do is to build the frame of your bar. For the most basic box frame you could use 108” 2×4s as well as 29” 2×4s. This will determine the size, shape, width, height, depth, and breadth, of your bar. (Did you go and look up “breadth”? Ha! Got you! It’s basically a fancy way of saying width. Sucker.) Start by building the frame for the front of the bar (customer’s side), then the side frames (depth) and lastly, the frame for the back of the bar (bartender’s side).
Skin that frame!
Okay so once you’ve build the skeleton for your bar you’re going to want to put some skin on that puppy. For the skin you can use just about any material you want: wood, drywall, vinyl and even sheet metal. Once you’ve figured out which material you’re going to use, buy the appropriate sized sheets of it, saw it down to fit the frame, and using your drill you can screw the skin to the frame.
Bar top
The bar top is extremely important, as this is what your friends will be resting their heads on after too many shots of tequila. It will also be where all the drinks go, so you’ll probably want to top the bar with a high quality wood, or if you want to make things fancy you can top it off with some granite or tile. If you plan on adding a bar rail around the bar top, a simple method would be to add two sheets of wood for the top, with one placed about 3” back from the front, leaving a 3” groove to install your rail.
Bar Rail
You can create your own bar rail or you can purchase them pre cut. We recommend pre-cut, as there are many chances for you to ruin everything by attempting to shape your own. Once you’ve measured everything and trimmed your rail, you can glue it to the bar top, using clamps to hold it in place while you drill screws into the bottom. Feel free to leave the rail exposed or add some cushioning for your friends with sensitive elbows if you so desire.
Extras
So now you should have the most basic bar imaginable. If it resembles a origami swan, you should probably go back to step 1, where we told you to seek out a professional. But if you think it can comfortably support a full beer bottle without collapsing into a millions splinters, then you can stain your wood any color you like, and probably even varnish the bar top to protect it from the gallons of liquids that will certainly be spilled on it. You might want to add some sinks, faucets, doors which open and close, and maybe a fridge of some sort, but these things are so far beyond our expertise that we are legally forbidden to discuss them with you. If you want to buy a foot railing of some sort that’s fine, you can usually buy the whole kit, complete with installation instructions, or you can supply your friends with giant telephone books to rest their feet. Let’s face it, when was the last time you actually used a phone book?
In your dreams buddy!
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