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I like tea.
I like beer.
I don’t want my tea to taste like beer or my beer to taste like tea… so, why?
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The best liquid ever?
I beg to differ.
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Good grief, it’s not even alcoholic… what’s the point?
And here’s another puzzler I saw in the grocery store snack aisle.
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No cheese cheesiness?
No.
Just, no.
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And we’re so in love with ours right now I fear they’ll be occupying blog space for a while.
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Do you know how nice it is to actually be able to sit at our bar?
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Trust me, after weeks of standing? It’s seriously nice.
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And yes, I admit a fair amount of alcoholic beverages have been consumed in the short time we’ve owned them.
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Note to self – clear off magnetic bottle opener before guests arrive.
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Ah….
Chairs.
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The call that we’d been waiting 7 weeks for finally came.
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And we headed down to the workshop in Biddeford to pick up our custom made bar chairs.
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It was an awful morning, snow showers at our house and rain farther south.
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So I was bound and determined our haul was going to be tightly secured and fully covered for transport.
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These babies are heavy, so when we got home the husband had to haul them all out to the Man Cave.
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Made from 120 year old reclaimed Vermont barn boards, no two are the same.
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At first the husband was upset they didn’t all match perfectly, but that’s what I love about them.
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And they may not look it, but they’re quite comfortable.
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So yes, an inaugural beer was poured. At 10:45 am.
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And consumed while seated. Don’t judge…
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Though why the darn man wasn’t smiling I have no idea. He really was happy, but I guess you’ll have to take my word on that.
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We drove through a small town the other day where I saw a building named after me.
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But it was a gym and not a bar, so clearly they have no idea who I am.
In news from the grocery store, it looks like there was a run on kitty litter.
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Are we hoarding that now? Damn. I didn’t get the memo.
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Ha! You have to love clever ad men.
And finally, I bought a calendar for the barn bar.
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It’s appropriate as fork.
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So now that we have a comfortable, heated and (well stocked with beer) man cave, it was time to get down to some serious board game playing. Covid social restrictions make multi player games like Pictionary and Cards Against Humanity a no go, so we searched for something fun to play with two people.
The husband won’t play Trivial Pursuit or Gin Rummy with me anymore because I wipe the floor with him every time. So we tried a game a friend had given us last year as a gift.
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Simple enough, you finish the lines from various categories… music, literature etc.
We played three games and I skunked my other half three times. Even though I gave him music questions from his favorite song.
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So we moved on to a classic, Scrabble.
It wasn’t an easy start and we didn’t have a lot to build from.
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My task was made even more difficult with letters like these.
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And these.
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And then these.
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But after a marathon four and a half hour game?
I won…. and my husband was pickled.
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I woke up this morning to proof of late night visitors.
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Thankfully they weren’t the kind who deploy the anal probe….
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But it does look like they surveyed the Barn Mahal.
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And who could blame them?
Heated winter space with a fully stocked beer fridge is a hard thing to resist for any species…
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I should win it.
Hands down.
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Because I’ve been looking at this mess for…. count them…. 37 frickin’ days.
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This giant load of useless crap was belched from my husband’s closet in the den on December 8th when he needed to climb up in the attic.
I didn’t bitch, it was a necessity.
And since he had the next 30 days off work because he didn’t take any vacation in 2020, I figured he would deal with it at his leisure.
I was wrong. So very wrong.
I didn’t bitch a week later when it was still there.
But two weeks later? I was bitching silently in my head.
Three weeks later? I was bitching in my sleep.
Four weeks later? I was bitching opening while plotting his slow, but quite painful demise.
It’s only today, 37 frickin’ days later, the day before he goes back to work….
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That he decided to deal with it. Of course it’s not a matter of simply putting things back in the closet. No. That would be too simple. Instead, each and every item must be fully examined and then brought to me for the desired but never realized “Gee, that’s swell. I wish you had 6 more just like it!” response.
Then he leaves the item in front of me with hopes that I’ll look it up and find it’s worth thousands of dollars.
FYI? The Moosehead beer mirror my husband knew was a vintage bar collectible?
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Turned out to be a carnival prize worth $10.
As I type he’s knee deep in a stack of tattered Look magazines from the 60’s.
This clean up may take a while.
Another 37 days is not out of the realm of possibility.
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*Update – 5 hours later? The room is still littered with crap and there’s a ladder in the hallway.
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Good times.
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Because we all need a little chortle now and then.
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I hear ya sister.
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This is a brilliant idea.
I shall be cc’ing the CDC immediately.
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That’s pretty much been our last 10 months. You?
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Rode hard and put away wet.
Yup.
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This is almost too true to be funny.
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Wish that happened when I tried it.
Though I do firmly believe in sanitizing from the inside out when it comes to tequila….
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No, not my marriage. Though after the year long storage barn to man cave extraordinaire remodel you’d be well within your rights to think that.
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No, I’m speaking of the actual bar construction . The interior has been walled in….
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And after being given 2 coats of stain and 2 coats of polyurethane… the top is looking pretty spiffy. (Our contractor elf says he wants 3 more coats of poly and sanding just to be safe.)
So the next question was, what to do with the inside walls. Stain? Paint? Leave bare? We love the black accents scattered throughout the room so we gave black a moment’s thought…. and held up a black sheet to get a visual.
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But the way the bar is laid out, you’d only see a small portion of black as you walked in the door, so it didn’t balance.
And with that much stain on the bar, I just couldn’t see trying to match it. So for now we’re leaving it bare.
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And besides, the mini fridge will be in there.
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Here? The husband’s choice.
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There? My preferred spot.
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But most likely here.
Because after he settled it in that corner? He informed me his next purchase will be a kegerator… which will be placed right in the middle.
(Remember when I said I wasn’t talking about the end of my marriage being in sight?
I may need to rethink that.)
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After waiting a month and a half for construction to start…
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Our rarely seen contractor is really picking up the pace. I’m starting to think he might be an elf, as we never actually catch him working.
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All the facing boards and bottom moulding are in place…
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And it won’t be long before we’re bellying up for our inaugural beverage. Ironically right after we discovered the new updates a friend and his son showed up to check the progress.
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They hadn’t been here in months and were shocked at the transformation.
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Darts were played.
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Beer was imbibed.
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And shock was expressed that still live rounds were prominently displayed.
🤣
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