more City O' City work

Some critical crunch-time maneuverings with the City O' City project. With only a week until the scheduled opening day (the restaurant has been closed for 6 weeks during the remodel/expansion) Randy and I were working a week of consecutive all-nighters. Weekends we'd be working in the restaurant space from 7pm until 7am. It was a fun routine to experience the city (and Capitol Hill neighborhood in particular) go through it's transition from daytime to dead of night and then back to life as daybreak came to a pair of weary craftsmen. Weekdays I still had to work at the couriers, and never in my life have I managed to survive (barely) on just a couple hours of sleep a night (and sometimes none at all) for almost 2 weeks straight. We got most everything done, and all of the critical things needed to run a restaurant. Still some finishing touches of various degrees to tackle in the coming week or two.

Some photos of the progress:
This will be the coffee service area behind the orange/brown metal. In front will be one of the large barn-beam countertops I've been working on. The metal in the following pics in the sheet metal skin taken from a 1946 semi-truck trailer that Randy bought from an old junkyard and repurposed here as the interior finishings.

The kitchen bar service area will have the second barn-beam countertop and allow patrons to eat while watching into the open kitchen. The wall light fixtures were also salvaged from an old warehouse and retrofitted with ultra-efficient LED bulbs.

Transporting the finished barn-beam coutnertops from Randy's workshop to the restaurant on the top of his old Volvo wagon. I was terrified that they'd slide off en route, dashing my dozens and dozens of hours of work perfectly finishing the antique wood.

Today I learned to use a cut-router! Safety glasses did their job.

Opening night!!!!

Still need to hang the custom chandelier and matching fiber-optic light fixtures, and a few finishing touches. But all the major things got done, the city health inspectors passed our work and there was a line out the door all night long. And I learned an amazing amount of skills from Randy; this has been one of the most rewarding and interesting opportunities I've had in a long time. I'm very grateful to have had the chance to work on this project.