Cold Frame in the garden

For several years I've been wanting to experiment with a cold frame in the garden, and finally this year I got around to constructing one. Spurred along by having access to Randy's workshop and having dumpster-dived about 99%of the materials used, I dug in just 2 days before the first forecast frosty night. It was hurried, to say the least. A masterpiece, not as much.....


9 lettuces and 3 hearty kales generously donated by way of D.U.G. have become my pets/specimens as we forge ahead into the frigid months to come. The idea here is to cultivate a miniature greenhouse to protect these lucky plants from the inevitable chill of Denver winter. How long it will persevere, remains to be seen.

City O' City- installing the chandelier

First off, for a much better expose of the finished work at City O' go to Randy's site!

Last of the major work at City O' City is transporting the custom chandelier (and it's 1000+ individual strands of delicate fiber-optics) from the workshop to the restaurant, and then hanging it from the ceiling beam. It was built while hanging from a custom wooden frame, so we modified that to keep everything in place and then late at night trailored it to City O'.

It made the trek without incident, and we had a team of good guys to help move it into place and install it hanging from the ceiling beam above the large community table in the center of the restaurant.

The finished product resplendent in full effect!

View from the table directly underneath the main chandelier- this is only a small portion of the whole apparatus, but you get an idea of just how much tedious work April did to individually hand-build each and every strand of fiber-optic string.

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.

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.