I was supposed to fly to Toronto after lunch, but my conscience felt that there was too much work left undone. I figured that with one more solid day, I could move the restaurant from a state of "me panicking for a week, while I was away," to a state where it felt like the restaurant was getting close to being ready to go. I changed my flight to Boxing Day, so I could keep working.
In the end, I was glad that I did. I worked all afternoon, evening, and night, so I got an incredible amount accomplished. Sleep is over-rated. I put away a huge pile of extra stuff from the upper dining room in the afternoon, and by the time I was done, I could see the carpet again! I estimated that there was only about 10% of the equipment and supplies left to be sorted out. I need to build a couple more shelves in the kitchen and in the back storage room, and once those are done (probably not until January 5th), I will be able to put the rest of the stuff away.
I was pretty amazed by the amount of traffic though downtown Sackville for afternoon of Christmas Day. I had a guy from Amherst coming in to ask if I knew of any bootleggers. Surprisingly, I don't know any - I like to plan ahead and have lots at home, so the issue has never come up for me in the past. I also had a great visit from Matt Jonah, a friend of mine who works at the University. He talked to me about some supply possibilities on used equipment, and he also brought to my attention a very exciting idea for a special "international cuisine" night. I can't go into details yet, but I think that his idea was brilliant.
It's amazing how many people stop by to give suggestions. And it's pretty funny that many of them are diametrically opposed to each other. Everybody wants to offer advice, and thinks they have fantastic ideas that would benefit the restaurant. For me, it gets a little overwhelming to listen to so many ideas, but it's worth it, because some of them are real gems.
I also had several people walk by and peek in the windows, and wave to me while I was working. Some days I feel like I'm on stage when I working in the dining room, now that the newspapers are down. A few people have said that I should have left them up, for the element of surprise, but I like the people from Sackville to be able to look in and see what we're working on.
The majority of my night was spent on repainting the chairs that were inherited from Remy's Bistro. Although the vinyl seats had already been re-covered, I still had to paint them. I ended up spending about nine hours repainting 53 metal chairs, and after experimenting earlier in the week, I had quickly determined that spray painting would be far more efficient. It was a tedious and messy nine hours, but I did learn one important thing: there's no need to spike the eggnog on Christmas evening when you spend it in an enclosed room, spraying off thirty cans of spray paint.
Even though I'm now in Toronto, I've turned supervision of some of the tradespersons over to an associate of mine, Ian Allen, so at least you'll still be able to read daily updates for the next couple of days.
