"I Love This Bar": How a Toby Keith Song Can Inspire You at Home

Recently, it was announced that Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill at the West End suddenly shut its doors after its failure to pay taxes resulted in the state taking away it's ability to sell alcohol. That sure puts a damper on a business model that revolves around country music and serving beers in Mason jars. My friends and I were bummed to hear the place was closing because it always was a fun time! Good thing we were in the process of creating our own bar at home! So, queue up the Toby and get inspired to create your own bar area at home!

Bar setups are a plenty on Pinterest and retail stores like Target, West Elm, and Ikea have made it easy to create a small bar space with trendy bar carts. But, now that we bought a house and have more space than when I was living in an apartment, we decided it would be fun to create a larger bar space. My inspiration came from these blogger photos:

For more on these examples, visit here and here. The biggest investment we made for the bar was the server piece that provides storage for wine, liquor, bar accessories, and some glassware. Some of these servers can run upwards of $800-$1000 at places like Pottery Barn and other furniture stores. We ended up purchasing ours at Nebraska Furniture Mart when we were home visiting my family for about half the price. Other options to keep costs lower include keeping an eye on "buffets," and "bars." Everyone seems to list them as something different. World Market and Overstock.com also have some more reasonable options.

Between the two of us, Chris and I have more glassware than we know what to do Craigslist or local occasional shops for an even better deal. I recommend doing searches for "servers," with. Putting together the bar was a great way to display and store much of it! We decided to use margarita glasses, martini glasses, beer mugs, champagne flutes, and some other beer glasses. The cabinet has some space below for wine glasses. We also had some beer growlers around that made for a fun addition to the shelves as well. Finally, I had a metal "Cheers" sign from a trip to Mama's Happy (a great occasional shop with a couple of permanent locations now as well) to put up.

On top of the cabinet provided more space for glassware, our wine decanter and a set of vintage shot glasses Chris also had from his grandparents. We dug out an old tray from Ikea -- that I still may stain darker -- and put an array of liquor bottles on to finish it off.

And voila! We now have our very own bar. I can't wait to put it to good use in a few weeks when I host another Bachelorette finale party!