Once the room was built, it was time to start turning it into a tiki room. Lina started by putting some abaca cloth on the roof as a temporary solution until she could think of something better. It’s still there in 2023!
The outside walls were brick, so I cut a 1/4″ piece of plywood to size and mounted it to the wall at every corner and a couple of key points with masonry anchors through the wood. Then Lina stapled thatch to the plywood and added bamboo poles and tiki masks on top.
She covered another brick area with some home-made tapa cloth she created with a marker on paper grocery store bags.
Every tiki space needs a bar, so our classic bamboo bar went into a corner.
This space is also our movie night room and we invite people over to watch movies on the 5’x 8′ screen occasionally. We can’t have an eyesore like that one wall, so Lina made a giant quilt to cover the screen when we’re not having a movie night.
We’ve also been collecting a bunch of rattan furniture at estate sales and started putting it in place.
We wanted a comfortable spot for us on movie nights, so we custom-ordered this hide-a-bed from a company in Florida.
Lina and our neighbor were also working hard outside the tiki room. Our neighbor started experimenting with concrete forms stamped with real elephant ear leaves and created some steps and plates to get the rainwater away from the house.
And, of course, it’s time for Waterfall 3.0 our neighbor made from chicken wire and cement.
I added some lighting at night:
And it looks great in the winter, too!
We were plugging away on the plan, which suddenly changed when we had a party to show off our new space. Our friends told us about a bar they saw at a mid-mod dealer and we were knocking on their door the next morning. They weren’t open…but Lina WANTED that bar, so they let us in. Lina fell in love the moment she saw it and HAD to have it and didn’t even bother to haggle, which meant we got free delivery and a couple of Filipino ceramic busts along with the backbar.
It was too big for the tiki room, so we found a spot that started the tiki creep into the rest of the house.
Now we had three bars and the Witco became a plant stand.
More was done in 2018, but we didn’t document it very well. So the next installments are a bit of a jumble.
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