Painting The Bar Area

Yesterday was a solid workday. We looked at the bar (& cash register) area for a while, and decided that rather than keeping it in dark blue colors, we'd paint it to match the theme of the dining room. The alternative was to pull all the tiles off the counter and walls (which is still possible), but we thought we'd like to try painting them first. We primed them with a BIN primer product, then started to apply a heavy melanine paint that supposedly dries into a nice countertop finish. The process was very time-consuming, and Nick worked on it all afternoon and all evening. By the time he was done, he finished all the priming and then finished the first coat of brown on the counter, which looks ok today. However, the second coat will tell the tale.

The first coat has slight ripples in it, and we want the counter to look like real tiles. When we apply the second coat this afternoon, we're going to lay it on fairly thick and apply a hair dryer the whole time behind him, so the heat and gravity should smooth the surface out better. Hopefully that will give us the effect that we want. The walls are less of a concern - if those surfaces turn out to be rough, I can live with that, so at the very worst, we'll only have to install new tiles on the bar countertop.




Also last night, the strangest thing happened. At 1:30am, we had our first customer. Now you have to realize that at the time, there were about 50-60 ceiling tiles spread around the restaurant, covering all of the visible floors and tables. And there were about 14 milk crates of old tools in the entryway that had to be navigated to get into the restaurant. Add several trouble lights, newspaper on the windows, a missing ceiling, and paint buckets spread out everywhere, and you are probably starting to get a good mental image. The restaurant looked like a cross between a construction site and a war zone. Anyway, the gentleman that came in looked around for a minute, then he looked at me and said, "Are you open?" I was slightly taken aback, and said, "for what?" He said, "Can you make me a pizza?" I laughed and told him that I'd love to, but it would be about four weeks.

The only other notable thing that I got accomplished yesterday was talking to some of our major suppliers to arrange times and dates for changing services, ie. NB Power, Aliant Communications (to move our phone lines), Irving (to move our propane tanks), and ADT Security (to set up a new alarm system).

Today is the last day that we're open to the public in our old location at 28A York Street. We have a private Christmas banquet tomorrow evening, then we can finally start moving equipment into the kitchen next week to start the second phase of our move/expansion.