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.