With the main part of the room largely finished, we turned our attention to the bathrooms and the bar set up. We have A LOT that needs to happen behind this bar – we’ll have a full bar (beer, wine and liquor), coffee, tea and non-alcoholic beverages and since we don’t have a kitchen we’ll be prepping sandwiches and cheese plates back there too. Every inch of space needs to count.
We’re planning on building open shelving on the main wall behind the bar, but I knew we would have a lot of items we wouldn’t want in public view – cleaning supplies, paper goods, coffee filters, etc. We don’t have any storage space in this building, so we needed to work some hidden cabinets or cupboards into our plans.
I used painters tape to map out our equipment locations and the open shelving. It was a terrific way to visualize what was going on, and it was easy to make adjustments before we made expensive purchasing mistakes or hung anything on the wall.
I thought the shorter wall would be a good spot for some cupboards, so we checked out our local ReStore, which usually has lots of them. The problem we ran into was that we needed the grouping to be a very specific size and the cabinet sets in the ReStore are usually sold as a full kitchen set.
We found an ad on Craigslist selling assorted cabinets for $25 each, so we headed over to a not-so-great part of town to check it out. On the 2nd floor of a sketchy looking building, we found a giant room piled with old tires one side and old kitchen cabinets on the other. Not weird at all, right?
And a fake fur coat that said, “Make an offer”.
The cabinets were NOT nice…we are not talking about dated oak cabinets that could be refinished to look fabulous.
The doors were super-shiny plastic.
But, the price was right, they were sturdy, and the size was exactly what we needed. Paint and primer have come a long way, and I was confident I could paint them and make them blend in without being offensive. We paid the man and loaded the cabinets into the truck.
Thankfully, we didn’t get caught up in anything funky or get sold into white slavery.
Sometimes, being chubby and middle-aged works in your favor. 😉
Once we got them back in the room, I took everything apart, scrubbed the hardware and began coating everything with primer. If you ever need to paint crappy, shiny plastic kitchen cupboards, use this stuff – it works great.
I used 2 coats of primer.
Followed by 2 coats of paint and a coat of polyurethane.
The boys mounted them on the wall for me.
And I replaced the hardware and doors.
Our bargain ghetto cupboards don’t look bad at all, and I’m glad I didn’t try to do something decorative on the doors. The brown paint I used throughout the room worked perfectly to make them blend in.
Another successful DIY project in the books…what’s next?
