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The shop is in its final stages of build out. But frankly, opening the doors still feels so far away! Our previous posts, Help Us Get Creative and Let’s Build It, can give you perspective on how far we’ve come, but the finishing touches are still to come. The contractors are working hard, and it shows.
Approvals, Negotiations, Initial Permitting, and Bids: Completed
Funding: Completed
Moving the Fire Door & Wall Repair: Completed
Plumbing and Electrical Infrastructure: Completed
Tiling and Paint: Completed
Counter and Shelving Construction & Installation: In Progress
Signage: Pending Historic Preservation Board Approval
Final Inspections: Pending Counter Top Installation
Opening: Pending Inspections
Paint & Tiles
The entire space changed when new paint was applied to the walls. It looks beautiful! Dark chocolaty brown on the ceiling, mocha on the accent wall and soffit, and beautiful white soft-finish tile work that anchors and supports the entire color pallet. We can wait to see how the spices look with that beautiful tile work as a backdrop. The tile wall was our bigger investment because we wanted the food prepping and tasting area to look as refined as possible. We think it’ll pay off.
Window Sills
The decision whether or not to treat the windows and replace the sill was tough. On one hand, the windows were “good enough”, so we didn’t prioritized the task in favor of other items. On the other hand, because our Community Sourced Capital campaign was successful, we had a bit of capital to give it a fresh upgrade. The general contractor also pushed hard to have it done, seeing it as a major piece of completing the overall space (and didn’t want someone to think that shoddy work was his… ha! Perfectionist). You can see above what it looked like once it was pulled out, and now we're very glad we did. That’s being worked on today.
Cabinetry
Hot-rolled steel counter tops are being fabricated in Spokane this week and early next week. We expect them to be delivered to us by end of next week, which will give us plenty of time to secure the cabinetry upon which the counter tops will rest. Seeing those beauties go in will definitely change the space in significant ways.
Our builder says the first cabinets are near completion for the tasting bar. We’ll go take a look at them this weekend and hopefully bring them to the shop as soon as some of the other gear is out of the way. We don’t want to crowd the shop too much with the floors still needing a treatment, but we also need to start loading in refrigerators and such. It’s a coordination juggling act.
Kitchen Items
This part is almost entirely Aaron, and it’s a lot of fun to watch him geek out on kitchen equipment, glass jars, and serving ware. For the spice wall we wanted apothecary jars with glass stoppers to give the feel of experimentation and discovery. We looked high and low for jars that fit the bill, and even talked to a local glass studio about making them. Those kinds of jars aren’t easy to find. That is unless you go to Amazon.com, of course. Duh. After hours of searching, there they were, right there, sets in all different sizes and for much less cost than we anticipated. We just had to use the correct search terms; it turns out that “reagent” is the new “apothecary”.
We’d convinced ourselves this would be an area we’d need to invest significant money, but it’s turning out that both the kitchen equipment and the lighting fixtures we wanted are significantly less money than planned! For whatever reason our luck has just been fantastic finding deals. Hurray for that.
Open Date
We are crossing our fingers for a May 18th soft opening. That date is all dependent cabinetry installation, bar tops arrival, and inspections (which can’t happen until everything is installed, and must be scheduled 2 weeks in advance). Oh yeah, and we have to pass the inspection. That will all be very tight, but it is our goal. Otherwise we’ll slip to Memorial Day weekend.
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