A Married Couple Walks Into a Bar

Last time I posted a photo of a wet bar. This is a rather special piece of furniture. Not only is this wet bar a brand new resident of the Martello home, but its previous home was also a place where April and I spent a lot of time and money...The gone but not forgotten Las Vegas icon known as...

The Stardust!

Yes indeed, this once stood in one of the suites at the Stardust Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. We recently purchased it at The Antique Mall on Flamingo and we've been giddy about it ever since.

The seller had purchased six suites of furniture from the hotel auction prior to implosion. This bar was the last of the six purchased and certainly the last of the ones available from this gal.

April and I tend to go to antique stores and other places that are fun to look at and enjoy when we have no money to spend. We discovered the bar a few months back when we were still rather new to the area and considerably more broke than we are now (we're still broke, but you get the idea).

April and I have been extremely good about the lack of silly and unnecessary purchases since moving out here. April is still looking for a better job and I'm not exactly tearing up the entertainment scene so there's not a lot of "fun money" to be found. In our fantasies about getting settled, established, and well...our fantasies of being able to stay in this house longer than the year we'd been contemplating how much our large living room could use a bar of some sort. We don't do a lot of entertaining but we do a lot of drinking and the room is more than big enough for such a thing. Ahh, the dreams of silly people.

As I have mentioned here before, we both have a lot of sentimental attachment to the Stardust. April owns a section of carpet from the casino floor (complete with cigarette burn!) as well as a commemorative chip and some other goodies. We were already enjoying the look of this wet bar when we saw it at the store. Finding out that it was a long-time resident in a luxurious suite at one of our favorite Vegas properties made this a pipe dream purchase and foolish wish immediately. What better piece of memorabilia could we find?

The cost on the piece, complete with certificate of authenticity was about $400.00. CLEARLY worth it to us, but FAR out of our price range. Truthfully I had MAYBE $400.00 to my name at the time and April wasn't much better off. We'd both agreed that if it were in the $150.00 price range we'd put a little cash down and scrape up the money later somehow. Since it was not going down in price we sighed and walked away.

After a few months, this most recent trip to the store found that bar with a big old "SOLD" sticker on it and we took one last look at it, thinking about what could have been.

After helping us find the price of another piece of Stardust memorabilia we'd been interested in, the salesperson asked if we'd seen the wet bar. Heartbroken, we told him we had. He then mentioned that the gal who'd purchased the six suites of furniture had one wet bar left. We assumed it would be at the same price.

As it happened this gal had recently moved to Florida and had given the OK to sell of whatever merchandise she had left at the store at all costs. She'd even told them to put the last wet bar in The Antique Mall's upcoming monthly auction (which was 4 days away). We'd asked if it would be possible to purchase it prior to the auction and if so, at what price.

The man went away to find out if it would be OK to sell early. We didn't really get our hopes up since things like that do sell pretty well in auction situations. He came back and told us they could sell it early and the best price they could take for it would be...wait for it...

$150.00!!!

A quick trip to the bank, where I had recently deposited some bonus money from work and where April had squirreled away some savings of her own, and BOOM! Our dream bar had become more than just a dream.

Currently it is not a fully-functioning wet bar. We don't own the house so we're not going to be doing any major plumbing as of yet. However we are looking into some temporary solutions to make the sink and faucet operational. The fridge that came with it still works like a champ and it is cooling some beer for us right now.

We're not sure how old the furniture is or how long it lived at the Stardust, but we're pretty certain that the piece itself is original with some after-market upgrades made to it, such as a glass shelf, new plumbing, and newer fridge which opens when the cabinet door opens.

We've already decorated it a bit with some Stardust playing cards and a matchbook. I've got a cool idea for some coasters as well. My personal favorite thing about THIS bar (as opposed to the other one we first saw) is that this one has a gold foil sticker on the mirror in the upper left corner which reads, "Property of the Stardust hotel & Casino". NICE!

There's lots of storage space for bottles and bar ware. We may replace the fridge with a pony keg fridge and run a tap. There's a convenient place in the corner that probably housed a lamp at one time and that spot would make much more sense with a beer tap running through it. Of course, if it is possible we may just have beer running though the faucet itself. Homer Simpson's dream would be our reality!