City O City expansion & remodel project

Busy local vegetarian restaurant / bar / hipster haven City O' City took on the retail space adjoining their original location near the State Capitol building in Denver. Our friends Randy and Sabin at Custom By Rushton were commissioned for the design and finish build of the new, expanded space and they had some awesome ideas. They work almost exclusively with reclaimed, reused and re-purposed materials: everything from using a 1946 semi-truck trailer to build the coffee & kitchen service bars down to the screws holding everything together are salvaged in beautiful and creative ways.

Lucky for me, they enlisted our help with a lot of the construction for this project. Randy is a true master craftsman in the old-school sense and I've been wanting to learn from him ever since I met him several years ago. Deadlines are looming, so while I'm still working full time with the couriers during the day, I head down the block to Randy's warehouse workshop in our neighborhood to work into the night on all sorts of interesting tasks and construction.

Making a curved shelf for the condiments/creamers/etc at the coffee service bar. This started as a single piece of 18" wide pine plank; we were able to cut it into 3 shaped sections, piece them together with the biscuit joiner, and end up with a beautiful single shelf. Here working on perfecting the curved edges; this started with a scrollsaw and eventually I worked all the way down to a 240grit sandpaper by hand.

Randy working on the 8-top table for the dining area. This began as an antique oak circular table that his dad had salvaged years ago from a mountain town bar. Legend has it that Jessie James himself has played poker at this table. It was lacking the 'leaf' insert, so we biscuit-joined four oak planks between the two circular halves to make a table large enough for eight folks to sit around.

We are installing two separate bars: one along the coffee service area and the other facing into the open kitchen. The materials are 100+ year old 3"x12" beams salvaged from an old barn. Two beams are joined together for each countertop, making a sturdy 2ft deep eating/drinking area about 16ft long. With the age, the wood is very weathered with small splits and various holes. Because it's an eating surface, we had to take a lot of care to hand-fill each tiny crack with an epoxy resin. I spent 3-4 hours a day for almost a week doing the finish work before they were ready to stain and seal.

April is helping Sabin with a large custom chandelier for the center of the dining room. This photo is just the beginning of the creation which will eventually have over 1000 individual strands of fiber-optic strings, each with a collection of reused items adorning the ends: Lite Brite pegs, antique typesetting parts, bicycle spokes, test tubes and plastic rings. It will be lit by LED lights shining into the fiber-optics so the entire chandelier will glow and shimmer. Each of the 1000+ strands have to be hand assembled in multiple steps.