A few years ago I ordered a bar for our front room: I wanted something massive, with a foot rail, where I could pretend I was in an old-timey western saloon.

From “Rio Bravo,” source: Jeff Arnold’s West

My bar arrived soon thereafter, dropped on a pallet in the driveway and encased in about 50 pounds of packing material. It was the size of a player piano and weighed roughly the same as a Volkswagen Beetle, but I made short work of the unpacking and, using furniture sliders, managed to haul it into the house without injury.

It was only then that I noticed a problem: the entire bar top, including the marble surface I’d been so excited about, was missing!

Sadly, it turned out that this model was the last of its kind, and when the online retailer was unable to locate my lost bar top, the manufacturer couldn’t provide a replacement, either.

They suggested I return it for a refund, but I liked the base and, to be honest, couldn’t face the prospect of dragging it back outside for a pickup. I did negotiate a partial refund to offset the cost I’d incur having a skilled cabinet maker finish the missing top for me.

Turns out, skilled cabinet makers are fairly thin on the ground and none of the ones I contacted wanted to build my bar top–and I was willing to pay as much again as the bar cost in the first place. But no takers…

So it sat, malevolently, in the front room for over a year. We averted our gazes when we entered the room, and covered it with discreet tablecloths when company came.

Eventually I realized that I might have to build the missing part of the bar myself. And why not? After all, I own a hand drill and a table saw and possess the bare minimum of skill required to operate them without injury.

I had already built crude benches and end tables for the house that gave certain credulous individuals reason to believe I could actually pull this project off.

Fools rush in, etc.

The first step was to lay down a Formica (r) top. The original was supposed to be marble, but since I have zero stoneworking skills I went with the Formica (also, I read too many horror stories of that sort of marble slab countertop breaking in transit or during installation).

I discovered that the way to install Formica is with contact cement: you spread the cement on both surfaces, wait a bit, then press the Formica onto the surface. There is no second chance: once the contact cement touches, it’s bonded FOREVER.

Knowing my affinity for disaster, I cut the formica well oversize to allow for alignment errors. Assuming I was able to successfully maneuver the coffin-sized sheet of Formica into the approximate correct position before it stuck forever, I figured I could then just trim it to size.

The “just trim it to size” operation was more difficult than I thought: after nearly losing a finger to a boxcutter slip, and discovering that any kind of shears would leave a ragged, gnawed-looking edge, I realized that there was only one solution: do what the pros do and use a router.

Unfortunately, I did not OWN a router. Fortunately, I was able to repair that oversight with a quick run to our local Lowe’s home improvement store.

That Bosch 1/4″ router was perhaps overkill for light Formica trimming, but it worked like a champ. Before I knew it, I had a professional-looking countertop on my bar base.

The next step was building up the bar top itself. I used a better class of board than the cheap, knotty pine I’d picked for all of my previous projects: having spent big bucks already on a new router, I hardly felt a qualm about buying boards that cost more per pound than filet mignon.

I was pretty comfortable with this part of the build: although most of my carpentry projects are characterized by a lack of true right angles, here the careful use of a framing triangle kept me honest.

I decided the narrow bar top should be surfaced with Mexican tile, some of which I found online.

(note: this is an Amazon affiliate link, which means that if you click the link and buy the associated product, Amazon pays me a fee–your cost is unaffected)

I attached trim to hold the tile run in place:

And picked a couple of appliques for the front to match the rest of the bar.

I bought a couple of cans of dark stain and chose the one that most closely matched the bar finish on a test board. I painted the trim flat black, then dry-brushed it with gold highlights so it would look like the metal trim on the base.

Finally, I was ready to lay the tile. I decided not to fix it with grout so we could swap out colors later if we wanted to. It quickly became obvious that the tile runs I’d built weren’t perfectly even, and that I would need odd-sized spacers to make everything look right.

Better planning would have prevented this crisis, but for now the only fix was–buy another tool!

This SKIL saw made quick work of my tile sizing issues, and, because I followed the manufacturer’s instructions very carefully, I finished the job with all of my digits intact.

To be honest, I’m still amazed how well this project turned out. All the planets aligned: I built a bar top for not much more than the original bar cost AND got to buy two new power tools!

A harsh critic might point out that the tile surface isn’t as perfectly smooth as a marble top would be, and that you have to be careful when you put your drink down. I say, if you want to be THAT picky, go drink your drink somewhere else.

I’LL be bellied up to my bar.