Tiki Room History

There were a couple of changes to the Jungle Flower in 2022:

We had a crafting class where we brought a bunch of our local Denver Tiki Tribe over to the house to make some masks out of normal construction foam:

The example mask didn’t really match our style, so I downloaded some images on the internet and printed them to scale. Here’s the finished result:

We added ultrasonic steam to the waterfall:

The fish in the waterfall pond got a high rise apartment they seem to enjoy.

We bought a new set of pretzel rattan furniture and I was planning to make the cushions for it during the restoration. But I needed some practice cushions first, so I took some cheap Joann’s fabric and made these cushions for the outside area:

Here are the original cushions when we bought them. The plan was to re-use the material, but the smell of cat piss made us dump them at the first dumpster we saw.

Here are the final cushions for the pretzel furniture, starting with a matchy-matchy solo seat:

The chair above used a LOT of fabric, so I scaled down the matchy-matchy for the couch set.

We had some flooding in the basement and the tiki-crazy plant-lady style started to creep into the basement during the remodel:

Lina has always wanted a bar sign and I wanted a project for the CNC machine. So she drew the following pattern in Adobe Illustrator:

I imported it into the CNC program and we made a prototype with foam:

Then I tweaked the design a little to get this:

We were happy with the finished product. Then it left my shop so that Lina could burn and finish it:

Once she was finished with the torch, we finished it with some water-based finish I had lying around and painted it. It looks great!

If you remember all the way back to 2018, we bought some deadstock beaded flower curtains. We really liked them, but couldn’t find anything to match.

So we bought a bunch of lei’s and separated out the flowers, and then beaded them onto a piece of wood the Lina carved and burned. Now they sit at every entrance to the Tiki room with an extra to match each side of the movie screen:

As everyone who’s ever had a party knows. Turning all of the lights on and off is a pain, and you always forget something. So I decided that I would try and automate all of the lights. We are a no spying household, so Google whatever and Amazon Echo weren’t an option, so I found a home automation box called Hubitat that runs locally in the house and does not need the internet. There are two main types of devices and I chose the Zigbee type.

There was some kind of sale, so we bought a whole bunch of bulbs and outlets and I got to work replacing the bulbs, switches, plugging in sockets, and connecting them to the automation hub. Once I got them all connected, I created some dashboards to keep track of the different devices throughout the house.

Each dashboard allows you to control all the devices in the room:

Once I got all the devices working (Do NOT buy SengLED bulbs!), I could create some automations:

My first big automation was turning on everything in the Tiki room when I turn the “Tiki Time” switch on.

Once I figured that out, I could turn a “Party Time” switch on to turn everything in the house on and set the lighting:

We bought a Jungle Box years ago and the box itself died pretty early. But I was able to get the mp3 file and create a little box of a scrap piece of 2×4 that turns on when power is applied by the automation:

The box still needs a back and get the final finish:

We had some 100 mph winds and Lina’s moai took a tumble. The Tiki Rancher gave us some foam carving tips at Inuhele last year and we managed to glue him back together and re-enforce him with some metal rods:

The Tiki Rancher also suggested using stucco instead of papercrete as a finish, so Lina applied some stucco. Now he’s too heavy to place by ourselves and we have to have a party to get him standing up again: