Over the past couple days, I’ve uploaded a handful of pictures of the beginning stages of a little project I’ve been working on in my apartment.  The place I’m in now aspires to be a two-bedroom unit, however the second “bedroom” is really just a big closet with a smaller closet inside of it, aka no windows.  That room is just of my living room, and ever since I’ve moved in, it’s just been sitting there, full of boxes.

Initially, I just wanted to better organize it so I could take all my books out of their boxes and put them on a shelf.  I’ve spent far too much time over the last couple months fishing through various boxes looking for something; it was time to fix it.  So, that was part one.  Now all the books are out.  For some reason, they looked like a larger collection in my old apartment.  There are still about 40 or so that aren’t there, but I was kinda surprised.  It was like 7 really heavy boxes, and just six almost full shelves.  Doesn’t seem cool.

After I finished that, I had a bee in my bonnet.  My bonnet is always getting bees in it.  So, I got out my utility knife and started hacking away at stuff, eventually coming up with a big hole in the wall.  The idea of the hole was that I wanted to open up teh weird room into the living room.  I basically removed the top half of the wall, and set about setting up a countertop/bar area.  I don’t have any good eating areas in my house- just a small table in the kitchen, so just a little bit of space would do a lot of good.  The counter is 55″ x 18″.  At first I was going to just make it 12 or 16, but I’m really glad I went for the extra width.

Grant and Katy’s bar in their kitchen was the inspiration, and though I didn’t get beautiful granite, I had what I thought was an okay idea.  A sculpture at the Art Institute featured, among other things, an old Johnnie Walker crate.  (I forget who the artist was, but he was famous and I wasn’t that into it.)  For my birthday, Colin gave me one of those old crates, so I took it apart, laid it on a regular plywood base with some birch paneling.  I’m going to stain the birch and then (hopefully) varnish the entire thing so it’s really cool and countertoppie, though I might just opt to get a piece of glass cut to lay on top.  We’ll see.

Finally, to complete the illusion of making the room seem larger, I replaced the old light in that room with some simple track lights.  Generally, I think track lights are kinda silly, though I suppose there’s a time and a place.  I’ve got one pointed at that Basquiat print, however I might put one of my more cool prints there.  (That said, all the bright colors in that Basquiat look cool next to all the bright colors in the books.  Maybe it will stay!) The other two lights are bouncing across the back wall.  Seriously, it works so well, you almost forget you’re in a tiny subterranean hobbit hole with 5 foot ceilings.  Almost.  I also put in a dimmer switch, cause you’ve got to have a dimmer, and for some reason I took a picture of both the dimmer and the boring track lights.

Fantastic.  Soon I’ll stain and install the bar top, then trim it all out, but you get the idea.