Moving Heavy Stuff is Fun

Yesterday we decided what to do about the bad soils report we got, and we moved forward with pouring the concrete footers that will support the posts that will support the beams that will support the roof. This was a symbolic moment: it was the first step in putting the building back together, rather that just tearing it apart. To commemorate it, I took a picture of our very own concrete truck:



Today Rick, the steel guy, dropped off the steel beam that will span the area between the two posts so that we can remove the remaining walls. Rick likes to work alone, and he has a metaphysical connection with steel. He told me that surface rust is Nature's way of protecting metal, which is an interesting way to look at it. I didn't know Nature cared all that much. Here's Rick getting the 1000-pound beam off his truck, by himself:


Rick diplomatically told me not to stop by on Sunday, when he is going to place this beam on the two posts (by himself), because he needs to listen to the pulleys while he does it. He requires quiet so that he can hear their messages.

I also helped Aaron, one of our contractors, move some huge pieces of "engineered wood" (a strange concept) inside. These pieces are going to go under the "floating wall" that currently doesn't connect to the floor. Moving them inside was tricky, because they're heavy and very long, so we had to keep backing up and readjusting our angle. Aaron came up with a scheme involving a wheelbarrow, which might have been harder than just picking the things up, but that's easy for me to say, since I got the wheelbarrow end. Here's Aaron being a goof-off (those are safety glasses he's wearing, not regular glasses):



Here's us trying to get a good angle to get in the door:



And here's a picture of us trying to figure out how to get the wood around a corner. Thanks, Jill, for this flattering picture of our butts.



I spent a few hours with a hammerdrill (which is like a handheld jackhammer) chipping plaster off the brick wall that will be in the coffee shop. Aaron lent me his fashionable safety glasses, Rick lent me some earmuffs, and I wore a dust mask, all of which left me with foggy tunnel vision, but were necessary because of the amount of dust that was generated. I got about a third of the plaster off (compare this picture with the first picture of the last post):



All those little speckles are not dust on the camera lens, they are dust in the air. My forearms and hands are still tingly from the vibration, but it was fun to make some headway. I love being at the building and seeing the tangible results of our planning. Our boys, as we call the construction crew (everyone calls us "the girls", occasionally accompanied by the admiring adjective "kicka*s"), are probably going to get tired of me hanging around, but now that I'm done with my part-time job, I'm planning on spending as much time as possible over there.

Colorado Clay and Credit Card Cons

Things have been a little sad around Generous Servings recently. On Monday we got the results of a soils test back, and they showed that our soil is too expansive to support the columns we were going to put in to allow the removal of more walls. It's the clay--the same clay that makes it a backbreaking chore to plant a tree also makes a really poor building substrate. Now we are doing more testing and working on a back-up plan, but in the meantime, there hasn't been any work on the building. It looks like the bombing of Berlin in there, and it's kind of spooky to have it stand empty in this state.

Despite this dispiriting state, Jill and I have been busy creating castles in our minds. Does this look like a coffee shop to you?



The orange spray-painted lines mark where the coffee counter will go. Jill and I role-played being baristas and customers to see how things would flow. The overall conclusion was that we're all going to be up close and personal in this café. We also think it would help if we hire an assistant barista who is about the same size as Jill.

We've also had meetings with food distributors, people who try to make concrete floors look like something other than garage floors (with little success), sign printers (not my favorite profession thus far), and credit card processors (much worse). I just learned that when you get rewards from using your rewards credit card, it's the places you purchased from who have to pay for that perk. All these years I've thought I was sticking it to Visa by always paying my bill in full and then getting my rewards in cold hard cash, but it turns out I was actually sticking it to Safeway, which I feel less good about. My conscience is clear when it comes to small businesses, though: I never pay for a $3 coffee with a credit card. When you do that, the coffee place has to pay about $0.30 to the credit card company and processor (more if you use a rewards card). Ten percent of your purchase just went to a company that you know would take you for every penny if they ever got the opportunity. Be kind to your neighborhood businesspeople, and please use cash for your small purchases.

Ever wonder who takes care of sidewalks?

A few days ago I was walking on the sidewalk in the Highland, and I noticed that in some areas there is some expensive-looking brickwork around the trees that are planted between the sidewalk and the street. I vaguely considered who would pay for this type of thing--is this where our tax dollars go? Well, in case you ever wondered anything similar, I now know the answer.

A guy from the right-of-way department (for heaven's sake, what a trumped-up title for "Sidewalk Police") came to inspect the sidewalks around our building, which happens every time someone files a change of use request with the zoning department. I was a little nervous because part of our sidewalk is buckled where it crosses over some tree roots, and our contractor had warned me that if the city got picky, we would have to pay to replace that section of the sidewalk. Let me show you what our sidewalk looks like:


So how much of that sidewalk do you think needs to be replaced? All of it. For example, here's a section that definitely needs to go:


This thing is a DEATHTRAP! It has "major cracking" and needs to be replaced immediately! Here, look closer:


That's a major crack. For the love of Pete. Most of our sidewalk sections have cracking, so they have to be replaced; or else they meet the next stone unevenly and need to be ground down. Then there are the handicap ramps that lead to the two streets: there's nothing structurally wrong with them, but they are not up to current city standards, so they've got to go too. And guess who has to pay for this? It's going to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000. That's about fifteen years worth of profits from our coffee shop.

Plus, the inspector told us that someone called in a complaint that our construction dumpster was blocking the view for people trying to make left turns off the side street (which is true, I've noticed the same thing myself, but it never in a million years would have crossed my mind to call the city about such a thing--who has time for this kind of meddling? Use your powers for good, not evil, people!). The inspector was pretty nice, and he even said that he was shocked when he started that job to find out that the city makes individual property owners pay for sidewalk repairs.

Wouldn't you think that one of the many taxes we pay would cover sidewalk repairs, or at least cover the ramps that go from the street up to the sidewalk? This clearly seems like an expense that should be amortized over many years in the form of property taxes or something (note how casually I used the word "amortized" there--six months ago I had no idea what that meant). It's absurd that nothing happens until someone buys a building, and then all of a sudden you have to fix everything. In the space of that right-of-way inspection on Friday, I became a Republican. Now I can never go back to San Francisco. It's not that I think I shouldn't pay any taxes, but apparently those taxes don't go towards any of the things I thought they did. If you had asked me a year ago whether I would support a tax for maintaining sidewalks, I would have said, "Well, what other choice do we have? Obviously we need to maintain sidewalks." I wouldn't have said, "Let's make some poor owner of a store that happens to sit near a decrepit sidewalk pay for the repairs. And if the store happens to be on a corner, then the owner has to pay for twice as many repairs!" Heck, I'm considering going to yell at my city councilman, and I don't even know what a city council is. It doesn't need to be this way.

On a less fanatical note, here's how you shore up a ceiling when you are preparing to remove a bearing wall and replace it with a post:


All those pieces of steel set at angles are holding up the roof. And here's me pretending to be working on the shoring. Actually I am just posing for this picture because I was showing off the building to my date and he wanted to take a picture of me, but I am including the photo here because I think I look really professional. Especially with my sunglasses on top of my head. And I find it astounding that I can have red-eye even when I am in complete profile.


The person who actually makes sure the roof doesn't fall down is Rick, our steel guy. Rick and I had a long conversation about the merits of canned chicken, after which I promised to bring him lunch so he doesn't die of scurvy before he finishes our job. I brought a sausage, mushroom, and egg strata, which was one experiment in my search for savory breakfast foods we can serve in the cafe. I tried a bite and immediately was reminded that I don't like savory breakfast foods, which makes this line of research less pleasant. It seems so clear to me that pain au chocolat is what the saints in heaven eat for breakfast. Then they have Vietnamese food for lunch and Indian food for dinner, and the next day they start over again with maybe a nice chocolate brioche or something.

Uh oh, nobody sneeze

The concrete removal guys worked all weekend and got all the concrete out of the building. That meant that we can now see what is under the walls, and as it turns out, the answer is: nothing! We have a bearing wall that is not connected to anything--it moves when you lean against it. Check out where the arrow is in this picture: that's a bearing wall, with the roof resting on top of it, and between the studs and the ground is air.



Today I met with the HVAC subcontractor in the building, and as we were talking, we heard the sound of a few pebbles dropping. Everyone froze and prepared to make a run for it if the roof caved in. But it turns out it was just Aaron, coming late to the meeting. Tomorrow the structural engineer is coming out to tell us what needs to be done to ensure that the roof does not fall down the next time a squirrel jumps on it. We're hoping the answer doesn't involve a new foundation.

Water and weeds

Our dad is in town, and we took him over to the building to do some landscaping. We wanted to trim the bushes and trees that block the view of the building from the street. No one had pruned these plants in decades, so there was tons of undergrowth and dead leaves and branches. As you can see, we made great progress.

Here's Jill and Dad trimming away.

The "before" picture (note the tree blocking the view of the building, and the big ugly bush on the right)

The "after" picture

While we were landscaping, the concrete removal crew was busy jackhammering the concrete out of the building (on a Saturday!--I'm sure we're paying extra for that). Near the end of the day, they hit a pipe and started a water leak that required a special visit from Denver Water to turn the water off at the meter. I tried to convince the Denver Water people that it would save them time to go ahead and replace our old water tap while they were at it, but they didn't bite.

The sign is up; the concrete is coming out

We've hit a small snag in the construction: after pulling up the floors, we discovered that there is a layer of very old, pitted concrete throughout the building. We have to have all of it removed and carted off to wherever concrete goes to die, and that's going to take a special crew of workers and another few days (and more than a few dollars). But the good news is, our "coming soon" sign is up!



We haven't decided where our permanent sign should go. I have negative feelings about the awning, but it is true that it has good visibility. We're open to suggestions!

Meanwhile, Jill and I have been working on setting up our accounting systems and finding a credit card processor, neither of which tasks fall into my "most favorite jobs" category. To balance that energy drain, I've been testing recipes: I baked some tasty chocolate-orange sweet rolls over the weekend, and today I made a very nice chiffon cake, which is tricky at high altitude. I baked the chiffon cake at the restaurant where I work part-time, and it wasn't until I finished the batter that I realized we didn't have a tube pan. I had to improvise by turning a champagne flute upside down in the middle of a springform pan, and covering the exposed part of the glass with a few layers of aluminum foil. It actually worked really well (no broken glass), except that I had to cut a chunk out of the cake in order to extract the glass (the glass had a flared rim, so both the top and the base were wider than the middle). Despite the unconventional baking equipment, the cake rose nicely and tasted good. Apparently my dog Biscuit also liked it--I had brought home the chunk I cut out and left it in a baggie on my counter, and when I came back later all that was left were a few wisps of plastic.

Why you should never upsize your water tap

Today I went to a riveting meeting of the Denver Water Board of Commissioners to present our case for relief from the exorbitant fees we have to pay because we are upsizing the water tap to our building. The building is so old that it has a 5/8" water tap, a size that isn't even installed any more in new buildings. Our appliances and fixtures require a 1" tap, so we have to replace the water meter, dig up the pipes from the water meter to the building and put in new pipes with larger diameter, and while we're at it we are required to replace the old lead pipes from the water meter out to the water main (which runs in the middle of the street). This requires that we pay for a lot of excavation, a permit to dig in the street, patching to the road, etc. Then, in gratitude for our work, Denver Water and Wastewater Management will charge us an additional $18,000 in "impact fees".

I tried talking to the woman at the service desk of Denver Water, and she told me that there was no way we were going to get relief from those fees, but I was welcome to attend the next public meeting of the Board of Commissioners to state my case. So I went, expecting to sit through two hours of really interesting discussion of pipes. The meeting did not start off promisingly--when I walked in I was handed an agenda that went on for about five pages, and a 25-page packet of color printouts of PowerPoint slides that were going to be presented (which explains where some of our $18,000 contribution is going). The meeting was supposed to start at 9:15 am, but people were milling around chatting about their vacations until well after 9:30. As far as I could tell, they all knew each other, and most were wearing Denver Water ID badges. There were about fifteen chairs arranged in Senate subcommittee style (along a long table, with a microphone and glass of water at each place), and about twenty chairs in the "audience" section. I sat on the end and tried to script my remarks in my head, because the agenda said that "public comments" were going to be right after the minutes from the last meeting. I was hoping someone else would start off the comments so I didn't have to be first, because I was getting nervous.

When the meeting finally was called to order, one of the three vice presidents said that we were going to skip the first page of the agenda and go straight to the debate on water rate increases, and I was worried that I had lost my chance. He asked if any members of the public were present for the debate, and no one answered. Finally I raised my hand and said that I was a member of the public who was here for a different matter. He looked surprised and said that they would start with my issue, then.

I said that I was a small business owner who had just bought a commercial building for which we needed to upsize the water tap, and since the service lines were lead pipes, we were now responsible for replacing those too, which was very expensive. And, I said, I learned that if we waited until the water main needed to be replaced, the city would replace any remaining lead service pipes, so in effect our replacement of these pipes was saving Denver Water money. I got a big laugh for that--I guess people at Denver Water really enjoy water pipe humor. I said that the impact fees were a huge burden for a small business that is already paying the actual cost of the tap and pipe replacement, so I would like to petition for relief from those fees. Everyone seemed really surprised and wasn't sure what to say for a moment. The vice president said that no one had ever raised this issue with them before, and after some other officials had weighed in, they agreed that they might consider putting it on the agenda for a later meeting. They told me the answer was no, we were not going to get relief from the fees, but they appreciated my bringing the matter to their attention. As if no one has ever considered whether the fees are a burden on the people who have to pay them.

Oh well, that was a waste of time. In the rest of our time, Jill and I have been talking with our architects, contractors, and engineers, trying to decide how to work with the building (as we have discovered it to be). Here's Jill looking through the plans to figure out how much space we have in the café, which has always been a big question: the café is small, so we really want to lay out the space efficiently.

Day Two of Demolition

After just a couple of days of demolition, the building already looks different. With most of the walls gone, it has a much more spacious feeling.

This is the same view as the first picture of my last post.

Jill and I helped the guys out by doing some sledgehammering. It turns out that the wall we hammered was actually supposed to stay, so it's a good thing we didn't get very far.


We discovered that above the ugly old ceiling is a nice vaulted wood ceiling...and absolutely no insulation. It reminds Jill and me of our summer cabin, which would be nice if we only had to work in this building in the summer. We're not sure what we're going to do about the ceiling yet.



The contractors also uncovered some cool old brick walls around the perimeter of the building. Of course, there's no insulation here either--on the other side of these bricks is the great outdoors. However, we love how the brick looks, so that may become our design focal point for the café.

The new home of the Cooking Doctor, physically and virtually

Thanks for checking out the new blog of the Cooking Doctor, a.k.a. Mary Brinig, cooking class instructor and owner of Generous Servings in Denver, CO. Along with my sister Jill, I recently bought a building to house Generous Servings' cooking classes and cafe. The building is in a wonderful and vibrant neighborhood in Denver that boasts great restaurants, cute restored Victorian houses, and a bunch of eclectic and cool residents (if you happen to be one of those residents, I'm looking forward to meeting you!).

We're giving our building a complete makeover, and in two months it's going to look totally different. In the interest of history, I took some "before" pictures. Actually, there really wasn't much of a "before" period because there was still a lot of trash in the building when we bought it, and then my contractors (the fantastic duo of Chris and Aaron from Oculus Construction) were trigger-happy with the sledgehammer, so by the time I got to take pictures, they had already knocked over several walls. Therefore we don't have any pictures of the empty building before it got trashed, but these photos will give you a general idea of where we're starting. The building is broken into four units, and each of those units has a wall separating the front and back portions (plus random closets, bathrooms, offices, and kitchens), so the building feels cramped and it's hard to get a feel for the whole space. We're going to take out most of the interior walls, put in a new floor, update all the utilities, and create the greatest teaching kitchen and cafe on the block.

Here's the view from the front door. The floor is covered with some ugly indoor-outdoor carpeting, but we found that there's hardwood underneath in the area destined to be the cafe (the wood might be too rotten to salvage, though).

These studs are all that remain of the wall that used to run through the center of the building. We're taking it out to open the space up for my teaching kitchen.

This is the back corner of the building. All the squiggles on the walls are left from pulling down the foam that was glued there by the previous tenant, who used this area for his musical pursuits.

This used to be the office area. The wood pieces are from workbenches that were installed here, which were cut up for removal.

This will be the front of the tenant space, which will be occupied by Happy Cakes Cupcake Bakery.