Bar Cabinetry Install

Another late-winter / early-spring project I wanted to work on was remodeling the bar. The first phase of this project was driving to Indianapolis and picking up a new bar, and ordering new bar cabinets. The second phase was putting in new flooring. And the third phase was actually installing the bar cabinets and the associated plumbing. As noted in this post, I ordered cabinets from a California company called New Age Cabinetry. Due to pandemic-related supply chain issues, I had to order some of the cabinets from Costco and some from Amazon. After about a month of shipping drama, they arrived at my house.

They came fully assembled, but they were fairly light and easy to carry down to the bar area to begin installing. The lower cabinets and counters were really simply, since they just had to be set in place.

One initial challenge was creating the corner joint, which required some creativity with a couple of pieces of oak trip and some dark oil-based wood stain.

After the lower cabinets were taken care of, I finally assembled the bar itself.

The upper wall cabinets and floating shelves were more complicated. I had never installed cabinets before and so I assumed it would be pretty easy since I was just following the ceiling, but I quickly learned that was not the case: because the ceiling wasn’t perfectly level and because the corner line between the back wall of the bar and the ceiling wasn’t completely straight, getting all of the cabinets to line up correctly was a challenge. I essentially ended up hanging all of them twice, but I was pretty proud of how well I was able to get them to line up!

The next day, I installed the sink, which included cutting out drywall to allow access to the hot water, cold water, and drainage lines from the guest bathroom, and cutting out the back of one of the cabinets along with a hole in the counter top.