Old Dining Room Emptied

Again, yesterday was a very busy day. Tiffany and Amanda started their day helping Alison paint the stalls in the two washrooms. After that, they spent all day packing kitchen equipment and supplies, and using Amanda's truck to move tables and chairs into the new restaurant. While they did that, Alison finished painting the trim in the upper room (I need to come up with an official name for that room). Tiffany also stayed later in the evening and scrubbed out all of the freezers and fridges.

I finished the rough coat on the ceiling tiles, sort of. There were about twenty tiles that proved to be a big problem. To paint most of the tiles, I just took them down and used a roller on them on a table, and then let them dry overnight, and reinstalled them the next day. However, the twenty special tiles were in place before the building's sprinkler system was installed, so the sprinklers were cut through the tiles, rather than tiles being put up in separate pieces around sprinkler heads. I was too nervous to pull down or cut out those tiles, because all of the sprinklers have glass heads on them which burst in high temperature. If I had accidentally broken one, it would have set off the sprinklers. I presume it would have only been in the one I broke, but I wasn't positive, and I didn't want to risk setting off the sprinklers in the entire building (including in the apartments of the 27 students living upstairs). Therefore, I had to paint those specific tiles while they were on the ceiling.

The drawback, of course, is that the tiles are porous, and it is impossible to use gravity to get the paint to run "up" into the holes when a tile is upside-down (on the ceiling), so I taped off each tile and spray painted them brown. The brown doesn't quite match the brown latex that I used on all of the other tiles, so they still stand out a bit, but I'll brush a coat of latex on them later this week to make them match a bit better. Anyway, the long and short of it is that the ceiling is NOT done yet, but at a quick glance, it looks like it is finished.




Nick finished painting the final coat on the bar area, and then finished the trim in the rest of the restaurant. I'm glad that we can finally clean up most of the painting equipment and supplies. While Nick was finishing the painting, Jeff did dozens of odd jobs, including removing all the lights and signs and stereo system/speakers from the old restaurant, and also disassembled the old office. The old restaurant is already looking very different, now that it is starting to get emptied out.