Wow, I just looked back at the previous article on renovating our basement and am amazed at how far we’ve come on our renovation journey. You honestly would not recognize the pub room now from where we started. Make sure you check out that article if you haven’t already. The last I updated, we had laid the new floor after pouring the floor leveller, and I was refinishing the bar.
In this article, I will explain how I refinished the pub furniture we bought secondhand to create the final look. In the following article, I will cover how we pulled the room together and discuss what I did to create a pub atmosphere. Check out some of the must-have items we added later in this article as well.
Projects, Projects, Projects!
Projects, projects, projects means work, work work. We know how much money we can save by doing the work ourselves, but we must be ready for the time, effort, and space it takes. Thankfully, my husband and I have the skills and space to work on these projects. (If you want to learn how to refinish furniture, check out the Furniture Flipping 101 program. Get started for as little as $60/week.)
Altogether, I refinished the bar, the backsplash, the bar shelf, the table’s top, a bookshelf, a media console, and a china cabinet. That’s seven pub furniture projects if you were counting! Keep reading to see what I did to achieve this.
We still have some shelves to put up – the Sapele mahogany wood is in the garage, but for the most part, I am finished with the bulk of the pub furniture projects.
Refinishing The Pub Furniture
All pub furniture includes a bar (or the good ones do). As the first project and the star of the show, we wanted the bar to catch your eye when you first walked into the room.
We found a cabinet on Facebook Marketplace that suited our dimensions and would meet our pub furniture design needs. The bar started as a dark brown, homemade1980s oak plywood cabinet. But I had a vision of what it would look like when I was done with it. Previously, we found a counter-height table and chair set that I wanted to match the bar colour to. General Finishes Candlight oil-based penetrating stain proved to be the perfect match.
Uncovering The Cabinet's Potential as Pub Furniture
I chemically stripped and carbide-scraped the old finish off the outside, including the door and drawer fronts, sanded with 150 and 180 grit, then restained with General Finishes Candlelight in penetrating oil stain. I used a few coats of Candlelight to really bring out the glow. The cabinet sat for a few months during the summer while we were busy with other things.
While many of us avoid glossy finishes, pub furniture, at least the bar, should be glossy. To achieve this sheen, I applied General Finishes Arm R Seal ™ in gloss. However, when I went to apply the Arm R Seal, I found the finish would bead up a bit.
General Finishes stains seem to have curing agents. Most other brands of stains don’t; you can easily remove them with mineral spirits (oil-based stains). However, all stains, including General Finishes, need a final finish coat. I believe the issue I ran into was that the General Finishes stain cured for longer than usual (months, not hours), and the finish had trouble biting onto the now-cured surface. I persevered, getting the finish to adhere, and I hope the end product will be durable. Time will tell.
Finding the Perfect Backsplash and Shelf for Pub Furniture
To finish off the pub bar, it needed a backsplash and a shelf to hold the liquor bottles. Several years ago, we found a flame mahogany veneered board at a store that salvages old building materials. The board was originally part of a piano and worked great as the backsplash with a few touchups.
My husband cut the board (carefully by scoring the brittle finish) to size. Then, I used Country Chic’s dark brown antiquing wax to go over the front and cover the white scratches in the finish, which I couldn’t soften with lacquer thinner (I had hoped it would work). I also painted the board’s cut end black and sealed it with more dark wax. My husband screwed the backsplash onto the back of the bar. We need to finish one more thin strip of wood to fit into the remaining small gap.
To add to the rustic element we were incorporating in our pub décor, we bought a piece of live-edge black walnut for the shelf to hold the liquor bottles. I stained it in the Candlelight colour to help blend the orange colour of the bar and backsplash with the reddish brown of the walnut. Then I sealed it in Arm R Seal.
The shelf is mounted with metal pipe brackets from Amazon. We should have used longer screws due to the thickness of the wainscotting board. So far, it seems to be holding up, and we hope we won’t hear a loud crash one night.
Must-Have Pub Furniture: Shelving
When deciding on pub furniture, including many open and enclosed shelves is essential. All pubs need lots of display space – the more details, the better. We have many vintage and antique items to display as part of the pub’s theme. Because this area will also be my display area, at least as far as I can find the room, I needed to find some display shelves to use as pub furniture.
The first shelving item we found was an oak china cabinet that was mostly in good condition except for some damage on the left side. I am not sure what happened, but I had to repair it to match. Next, we picked up a small vintage china cabinet for a bookshelf that also needed refinishing. We also added a great shelf from Amazon that fit our design and provided a spot to keep more glasses, including a wine glass hanger. You can see the shelf above in the photo of the bar with the black walnut shelf.
As mentioned above, there will be more shelves, but I have to finish a custom king-sized bedroom set in the garage before I can move on to those. (!)
I used my favourite green chemical stripper to remove the table’s finish and strip the outside and doors of the vintage bookshelf. I prepped the table with masking tape and plastic to prevent drips from landing where I didn’t want to refinish. The shelf had some stripes that were not in good shape on the inside of the glass, so I also used the chemical stripper to remove them.
Refinishing the Pub's Table and Chairs, Too, While I'm At It
The previous owners had used a cleaner or something on the pub table that had damaged the finish and made it sticky. Also, the table leaf didn’t match up either due to heavy fading on the table’s surface.
Pick Your Battles
When refinishing, I feel it is essential to pick your battles. In this case, I didn’t refinish the table’s base because the table’s surface was the only area with much damage. The chairs had scuffs and scratches, but because the damage was minimal, I sanded and stained the scuffs then brushed on a finish to seal the stain.
However, Oops...
I should have removed the bookshelf doors rather than tried to strip the cabinet with them on. Working on both sides of the doors was “easier” when they were on the cabinet. I had hoped to be more careful, but the stripper did drip inside and cause some damage that I had to repair later. Sometimes, shortcuts don’t work out and require more work.
Restaining and Sealing the Pub Furniture
After chemically stripping, I wiped everything down with a damp rag to neutralize the chemical, let it dry, and sanded everything with 150, then 180 grit sandpaper to even out the surface. Then, I made sure I removed all dust before staining and sealing.
Once the tabletop, table leaf, china cabinet, and bookshelf were ready, I stained the table and leaf in General Finishes’ Candlelight, the bookshelf in Dark Walnut by Varathane, and the china cabinet with Varathane’s Provincial stain.
I hand-applied the finish to the china cabinet but sprayed the tabletop, leaf, and vintage bookshelf. For the table, china cabinet, and bookshelf, I used Varathane Diamond Finish for floors in satin, my go-to water-based finish.
More Pub Furniture
Another pub furniture project I had to do was a media console we picked up for under the television. The console was a pretty inexpensive product with number stickers telling the person how to assemble it. It is oak veneer over an MDF substrate. The cabinet’s Mission style gives it a rustic vibe and the stain is the same colour as the table and bar.
The previous owner had not used coasters, and the veneer had swollen in places and needed some TLC. I didn’t want to go into a full-out refinish since the piece was not worth much effort. So I cleaned and sanded the worst spots, then applied stain and sprayed on a lacquer finish to seal it all in. It looks okay, and I am happy with how it turned out.
Once all these projects were ready, we hauled the refinished pub furniture downstairs and started assembling the room.
Adding fun touches to the pub furniture
Pub furniture should be retro or antique, with some fun elements. To help jazz up the bookshelf and bar, I applied peel-and-stick wallpaper to the backboard and the bar’s inside drawers and shelves. We replaced the bookshelf’s back panel with Luan plywood because it wasn’t in great shape. I highly recommend doing this for any cabinets you are refinishing. Luan is still reasonably inexpensive (relatively speaking), and it adds a professional touch to have a new back. With the cabinet’s back off, it made wallpapering easy… well as easy as wallpapering gets, at least.
To add a bit more fun, I painted the bookshelf’s knobs in Fort Red by Fusion Mineral Paint, then used antique brown wax to tone them down and blend with the style.
We hung the wall decor using these marvellous Command Strips ™ that use hooks and loops. I highly recommend them, especially for situations where you want to be able to position pieces in relation to others already on the wall. You put the sticky side on the back, and then remove the adhesive and press it to the wall. The instructions say to put the adhesive up first, but we just did it all in one step.
I hung up my wood and metal hooks with these super hooks, which work amazing. The hook punctures the drywall and slips in to hold the item firmly.
Add some lighting to your pub furniture
Another way to improve your pub furniture is to add some mood lighting. We installed LED strip lights from Amazon in the china cabinet and the glasses cabinet. I didn’t need to refinish this one!)
We added mood lighting to the TV with backlit LED strip lights to make it feel more like a pub. Backlighting also helps ease eye strain when watching TV in a dark room.
Other Elements we added
We installed cup hooks to hang our Moscow Mule mugs and coffee cups. I think I will add some downlighting to highlight the backsplash since it is shadowed from the shelf.
We put in a slim Keurig coffee maker, a retro-style microwave and a medium-sized fridge. (This is a different fridge than the one we purchased, but this one has a reversible handle, which ours didn’t.) Now, we can have a movie night with popcorn and hot cocoa, with cold drinks at hand.
up next
The last I left off updating everyone on our renovation’s progress: we hadn’t yet done the wainscotting, wallpaper, barn doors, or baseboards. See this article for the update on how we pulled it all together and an overview of how all of the pub furniture looks in the (almost) complete room.
