Going Underground - Craftsman Style Built-In Dry Bar!

It has taken YEARS, but our biggest project - the finished basement - is finally done.

And it's great!

We've increased the usable living space in our house by a full 30%. The kids have a living-room area for board games, and there's an additional bedroom and bathroom.

And now - finally - we have a built-in dry bar, which matches the built-in home theater upstairs.

We'd originally planned to build a modest dry bar ourselves - pick up some off-the-rack cabinets, buy a countertop, and call it done.

However, this is a pretty prominent part of the basement... and the rest of the basement renovation looked awfully great.

The cheapest off-the-rack cabinets at big-box home stores didn't fit the look we were going for.... and they were still going to cost us quite a bit.

Ultimately, we weren't able to DIY this dry bar project very cost-effectively.

And given that this bar needed to fit under the staircase, we were going to need a custom solution anyway.

So, we called in Tim Pollard from Heirloom Woodcraft.

A few years ago, Tim designed and built the craftsman-style built-ins in our living room. I really can't recommend Heirloom Woodcraft enough - this is incredibly high-quality workmanship.

Tim put together a 3D rendering of what could go in the space:

It's.... uncanny. Here's the finished product again, for comparison.

It's a match.

And, the project came in substantially less expensive than we'd been quoted at the outset.

Now, Heirloom is awfully busy - as you'd expect, with their reputation. We knew we'd be waiting a few months. It was worth it.

The new dry bar incorporates our wine refrigerator, has open shelving, cabinet wine racks - and every lower cabinet has pull-out shelving.

Even better - it's done in the same style as our main-floor built-ins. It ties the house together visually.

This was the final project for our Basement Remodel - and it exceeded our expectations.

While this marks the end of the "Going Underground" series, I'll update the main Basement Remodel page to show the entire process.

That article will have links to each of the "Going Underground" basement-related articles.