We have fought the good fight, we have finished the race
Skipping to the punchline, we made it through the inspections and are officially legal for business as of 3:30 this afternoon, which is handy since our grand opening party is scheduled for Sunday afternoon (2-5 pm, please come!). Up until 11:30 am, we didn't think we were going to get the final sign-offs allowing us to occupy the building by this afternoon, and up until 2:30 pm we didn't think we would get the last person's signature on our business license, which is required for us to sell anything. It's been stressful.
I haven't taken many pictures this week because we've been going at warp speed the entire time. I've had about an hour and a half of sleep over the past three days. Our goal was to get through all the inspections in three days, although the process usually takes about five days (not including fixing any problems the inspectors found). We needed to expedite the process in order to have our license by today so that we could have our party on Sunday, and Chris and Aaron are famous for pushing through inspections, so we decided to give it a shot. One of the major obstacles was scheduling--there is no system for letting all the city departments know that you are done with construction and need the final sign-offs, so each inspector has to be called individually, and there is a very strict order in which they will sign off, but no one is totally sure what that order is. To fit all these inspections into a few days, we went ahead scheduled inspections that you aren't supposed to call for until you've already passed earlier inspections, and crossed our fingers that we wouldn't have to admit that to the inspectors, because they get really mad when you do that.
We thought the critical day would be Wednesday, because that's when we were getting inspected on the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) work, none of which was totally done yet. It was tight--at one point on Tuesday there were multiple people representing each of those trades stepping all over each other inside, trying to finish up, and some mild inter-trade tensions flared up. Jill and I stayed out of the way and exercised our skills as professional package trackers, following up with the shocking number of companies who didn't deliver our equipment on time. We still don't have a few things that were supposed to be here by the week before Thanksgiving. When we went to the building in the afternoon, we heard the good (and slightly surprising) news that we had passed all the MEP inspections, and we were moving forward with the next round of inspections on Thursday.
Thursday's inspections were the "big picture" ones: the health department, the final inspector from the building department, the fire department, and "public safety" (I don't understand why there is a separate inspector for public safety, since it seems to be included in the other categories, but apparently there is no one else who can check whether you have a double-sided deadbolt on your front door, which was one of the major comments from the public safety inspector). Jill and I stayed at the building until 5 am trying to finish painting (which is the never-ending job), and I could feel that I was developing a bad sore throat that was being exacerbated by the conditions in the building: the heat still wasn't working correctly, there was tons of dust in the air, and then I was breathing fumes from oil paint that we had to use to paint our metal doorframes).
Thursday started off badly. There were still a lot of workers in there doing cosmetic stuff (including such small details as finishing the ceiling around the hood and building the cafe counter), so the place was filled with ladders, drywall dust and sawdust, bits of insulation, and mud, and it looked like we were going to be ready to open in about a month, as opposed to the next day. The building department inspector came first, and he was irritated because apparently he was supposed to come last (Chris and Aaron said that on the job they did right before ours, the rule was that he was supposed to come first). He agreed to come back on Friday morning if we had gotten all the other signatures first, but he wasn't in a good mood about it. Then Don from the health department showed up, and the first thing he said as he walked in the door was, "Why did you call me? You guys aren't anywhere close to being ready." Apparently for his inspection the place is supposed to be cleaned and operational before you call for your health inspection (which makes sense now that I think about it, but I've been focused on the construction details for so long that I didn't even consider that we would have to prove that we know how to mop floors). He said to call him back when we got the place clean. The fire department guy was nice, but he said that our exit signs weren't visible enough and we had to install more, so he told us to call him back on Friday morning to show him that. No one was completely sure if or when the public safety guy was going to come, because we hadn't gotten confirmation from that office, but by the afternoon morale was very low and we were sort of hoping he wouldn't show up, so at least we could get the building in better shape before he saw it and got mad too. However, he did come, and he said that three of our large front windows needed to be replaced because they aren't made from tempered glass, which is a requirement for any window within two feet of a doorway (apparently a lot of people miscalculate by two feet when trying to walk through a doorway). That doesn't come cheap.
Chris and Aaron did their best to recover by getting all the subcontractors to agree to come back early on Friday to do the required work, and then we strategized about how to schedule the inspections again. We knew that the inspectors were already irritated, and they were going to be really mad if we called them out there again in the wrong order. Chris got on the phone with Don, the health department guy, while Jill and I worked with Aaron on the design of the coffee bar. Then Chris came back and announced that we were screwed--Don had said that he was totally booked on Friday, there was no way he was going to squeeze us in, and he'd be back out on Monday to see if we were ready. That would mean we couldn't have the party this weekend. Chris said he had begged Don, and there wasn't any hope. All of us looked at each other for a few seconds, and Jill and I were getting teary. Then I said that I'd call Don and grovel, because I had nothing to lose. I didn't have a plan, and when he answered I just started babbling and trying to sound upbeat about how we could all be "creative" and solve this problem together. My voice was extremely hoarse, and maybe that worked in my favor, because Don said he could come out at 3:30 on Friday. I was totally surprised and went back into the building with a big smile to tell everyone the good news, but the first thing Chris said was that Don's visit would still be too late--we had to file the signature card with the building department by 3:30, and there was no way that office was going to stay open late for us. I put my head down on the counter. I still didn't want to give up, but I couldn't call Don again, but so I decided to write him and e-mail asking if he could come earlier. He never wrote back, so our only hope was that he might be early. We had to tell our food suppliers to postpone our big first orders that had been scheduled for Friday, because we can't legally accept food deliveries until the building has been approved.
By this point I had completely lost my voice, and Jill and I worked out a plan for me to go into the building department at 3:27 and require them to find a sign language interpreter, which we figured would take long enough that Jill might be able to rush over with the completed signature card, so by the time they found someone to help with my disability, we'd have all the signatures. It was going to be dicey.
We knew that the building had to look fantastic when the inspectors returned on Friday, or they'd never sign off on it--we'd already lost the benefit of the doubt--so we got to work cleaning and arranging all our furniture and equipment. We had to make several emergency trips to buy things like toilet paper and fire extinguishers, without which we could be denied permission to open (I know this sounds reasonable, but considering that we still didn't have a complete ceiling, the toilet paper seemed like a ridiculous detail). I stayed there all night, although I did take a short nap on a piece of cardboard on the floor. By 7:00 am the subcontractors started arriving to do all the stuff the inspectors had required, and they thought I was acting really weird because I wasn't talking at all, only gesturing and mouthing words. We still hadn't heard from Don, but Jill and I just couldn't deal with having to tell everyone that our grand opening party was canceled, so we just kept working as if we were going to open tomorrow. Finally I went home around 10:30 am to take a shower and get an hour of sleep.
Forty-five minutes into my nap, Jill called and said that Don was on his way. I was so deeply asleep that I don't remember answering the phone, all I know is that I heard the message and headed for the door. I had to collect a few things I thought Don might ask for, so it took me about twenty minutes to get to the building. I walked in and Jill and Chris were standing together looking white around the eyes with fatigue and anxiety. Jill said, "Don already came, he signed it, and we're done." I didn't even understand what she was talking about for a second. When I finally realized what she was saying, it still seemed unreal, and I could tell it hadn't really sunk in for Jill or Chris either. Chris said that we wouldn't be able to get our business license because there had been some miscommunication with the public safety guy, and he was out on site visits for the rest of the day and wouldn't be available to sign our card. But we could still have our party (we just couldn't sell anything), which was the most important thing. We all weakly congratulated each other. I called the public safety office and left a message saying that they were the last signature we needed and we'd really love to see them that afternoon, but I was pretty sure you couldn't understand the message because I had to whisper it. We all went down to the city building, and for good measure, we stopped in at the public safety office and were told (again) that the inspector was out on inspections, and he wouldn't be available to sign our card until Monday morning.
When we got back to the building, we called our food suppliers and told them we could accept deliveries, although we still hadn't gotten our storage areas set up, so we didn't have anywhere to put the stuff. I still couldn't talk and I was starting to have dizzy spells, and I really wanted to go home to take a nap, but people kept showing up with stuff. As I was deciding that I was really leaving, I looked up to see yet another guy at the door. Chris said hi to him, so I figured maybe it was a contractor I hadn't met yet, but then he asked for me. I couldn't speak, so Jill stepped in, and we found out that this was the public safety guy. We have no idea why he came, but he was in a great mood and signed our form so we could get a business license. That meant I had to go back to the city building to file that form, and at every red light I had to put the car in park in case I fell asleep and released the brake.
Upon my return I called to find out where our chairs were (they were supposed to be delivered yesterday), and was told they'd be there in half an hour. I figured I'd wait for that delivery before going home to sleep. An hour later, I called back and was told the same thing. Another hour later I called again, and this time they said that their truck had had a mechanical failure and was unable to unload the four-ton shipment that was blocking our chairs from getting out, so we wouldn't get our delivery until Monday. I told the woman that I had been up for 80 hours and they better find some way of getting the chairs to us before 6:30 am tomorrow. She wasn't pleased with my tone. I got connected to her supervisor. He said there was no way the delivery could happen today. I said it had to happen. A few minutes later, he figured out a way to make it happen.
So tomorrow is opening day--we're doing a "soft opening" in which we'll serve people who stop by, but we're mostly using the day to finish organizing and get some pastries prepared. I was going to bake some stuff tonight, but I figured that it was getting critical that I recover my voice, so I went home and will now sleep for a little while before going back to bake (and figure out how to hang our menu, hook up our TVs, mount our business name on the exterior, salvage our accounting from the mess we've made over the past few days, etc.). We are on for Sunday--I hope you can come!
I haven't taken many pictures this week because we've been going at warp speed the entire time. I've had about an hour and a half of sleep over the past three days. Our goal was to get through all the inspections in three days, although the process usually takes about five days (not including fixing any problems the inspectors found). We needed to expedite the process in order to have our license by today so that we could have our party on Sunday, and Chris and Aaron are famous for pushing through inspections, so we decided to give it a shot. One of the major obstacles was scheduling--there is no system for letting all the city departments know that you are done with construction and need the final sign-offs, so each inspector has to be called individually, and there is a very strict order in which they will sign off, but no one is totally sure what that order is. To fit all these inspections into a few days, we went ahead scheduled inspections that you aren't supposed to call for until you've already passed earlier inspections, and crossed our fingers that we wouldn't have to admit that to the inspectors, because they get really mad when you do that.
We thought the critical day would be Wednesday, because that's when we were getting inspected on the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) work, none of which was totally done yet. It was tight--at one point on Tuesday there were multiple people representing each of those trades stepping all over each other inside, trying to finish up, and some mild inter-trade tensions flared up. Jill and I stayed out of the way and exercised our skills as professional package trackers, following up with the shocking number of companies who didn't deliver our equipment on time. We still don't have a few things that were supposed to be here by the week before Thanksgiving. When we went to the building in the afternoon, we heard the good (and slightly surprising) news that we had passed all the MEP inspections, and we were moving forward with the next round of inspections on Thursday.
Thursday's inspections were the "big picture" ones: the health department, the final inspector from the building department, the fire department, and "public safety" (I don't understand why there is a separate inspector for public safety, since it seems to be included in the other categories, but apparently there is no one else who can check whether you have a double-sided deadbolt on your front door, which was one of the major comments from the public safety inspector). Jill and I stayed at the building until 5 am trying to finish painting (which is the never-ending job), and I could feel that I was developing a bad sore throat that was being exacerbated by the conditions in the building: the heat still wasn't working correctly, there was tons of dust in the air, and then I was breathing fumes from oil paint that we had to use to paint our metal doorframes).
Thursday started off badly. There were still a lot of workers in there doing cosmetic stuff (including such small details as finishing the ceiling around the hood and building the cafe counter), so the place was filled with ladders, drywall dust and sawdust, bits of insulation, and mud, and it looked like we were going to be ready to open in about a month, as opposed to the next day. The building department inspector came first, and he was irritated because apparently he was supposed to come last (Chris and Aaron said that on the job they did right before ours, the rule was that he was supposed to come first). He agreed to come back on Friday morning if we had gotten all the other signatures first, but he wasn't in a good mood about it. Then Don from the health department showed up, and the first thing he said as he walked in the door was, "Why did you call me? You guys aren't anywhere close to being ready." Apparently for his inspection the place is supposed to be cleaned and operational before you call for your health inspection (which makes sense now that I think about it, but I've been focused on the construction details for so long that I didn't even consider that we would have to prove that we know how to mop floors). He said to call him back when we got the place clean. The fire department guy was nice, but he said that our exit signs weren't visible enough and we had to install more, so he told us to call him back on Friday morning to show him that. No one was completely sure if or when the public safety guy was going to come, because we hadn't gotten confirmation from that office, but by the afternoon morale was very low and we were sort of hoping he wouldn't show up, so at least we could get the building in better shape before he saw it and got mad too. However, he did come, and he said that three of our large front windows needed to be replaced because they aren't made from tempered glass, which is a requirement for any window within two feet of a doorway (apparently a lot of people miscalculate by two feet when trying to walk through a doorway). That doesn't come cheap.
Chris and Aaron did their best to recover by getting all the subcontractors to agree to come back early on Friday to do the required work, and then we strategized about how to schedule the inspections again. We knew that the inspectors were already irritated, and they were going to be really mad if we called them out there again in the wrong order. Chris got on the phone with Don, the health department guy, while Jill and I worked with Aaron on the design of the coffee bar. Then Chris came back and announced that we were screwed--Don had said that he was totally booked on Friday, there was no way he was going to squeeze us in, and he'd be back out on Monday to see if we were ready. That would mean we couldn't have the party this weekend. Chris said he had begged Don, and there wasn't any hope. All of us looked at each other for a few seconds, and Jill and I were getting teary. Then I said that I'd call Don and grovel, because I had nothing to lose. I didn't have a plan, and when he answered I just started babbling and trying to sound upbeat about how we could all be "creative" and solve this problem together. My voice was extremely hoarse, and maybe that worked in my favor, because Don said he could come out at 3:30 on Friday. I was totally surprised and went back into the building with a big smile to tell everyone the good news, but the first thing Chris said was that Don's visit would still be too late--we had to file the signature card with the building department by 3:30, and there was no way that office was going to stay open late for us. I put my head down on the counter. I still didn't want to give up, but I couldn't call Don again, but so I decided to write him and e-mail asking if he could come earlier. He never wrote back, so our only hope was that he might be early. We had to tell our food suppliers to postpone our big first orders that had been scheduled for Friday, because we can't legally accept food deliveries until the building has been approved.
By this point I had completely lost my voice, and Jill and I worked out a plan for me to go into the building department at 3:27 and require them to find a sign language interpreter, which we figured would take long enough that Jill might be able to rush over with the completed signature card, so by the time they found someone to help with my disability, we'd have all the signatures. It was going to be dicey.
We knew that the building had to look fantastic when the inspectors returned on Friday, or they'd never sign off on it--we'd already lost the benefit of the doubt--so we got to work cleaning and arranging all our furniture and equipment. We had to make several emergency trips to buy things like toilet paper and fire extinguishers, without which we could be denied permission to open (I know this sounds reasonable, but considering that we still didn't have a complete ceiling, the toilet paper seemed like a ridiculous detail). I stayed there all night, although I did take a short nap on a piece of cardboard on the floor. By 7:00 am the subcontractors started arriving to do all the stuff the inspectors had required, and they thought I was acting really weird because I wasn't talking at all, only gesturing and mouthing words. We still hadn't heard from Don, but Jill and I just couldn't deal with having to tell everyone that our grand opening party was canceled, so we just kept working as if we were going to open tomorrow. Finally I went home around 10:30 am to take a shower and get an hour of sleep.
Forty-five minutes into my nap, Jill called and said that Don was on his way. I was so deeply asleep that I don't remember answering the phone, all I know is that I heard the message and headed for the door. I had to collect a few things I thought Don might ask for, so it took me about twenty minutes to get to the building. I walked in and Jill and Chris were standing together looking white around the eyes with fatigue and anxiety. Jill said, "Don already came, he signed it, and we're done." I didn't even understand what she was talking about for a second. When I finally realized what she was saying, it still seemed unreal, and I could tell it hadn't really sunk in for Jill or Chris either. Chris said that we wouldn't be able to get our business license because there had been some miscommunication with the public safety guy, and he was out on site visits for the rest of the day and wouldn't be available to sign our card. But we could still have our party (we just couldn't sell anything), which was the most important thing. We all weakly congratulated each other. I called the public safety office and left a message saying that they were the last signature we needed and we'd really love to see them that afternoon, but I was pretty sure you couldn't understand the message because I had to whisper it. We all went down to the city building, and for good measure, we stopped in at the public safety office and were told (again) that the inspector was out on inspections, and he wouldn't be available to sign our card until Monday morning.
When we got back to the building, we called our food suppliers and told them we could accept deliveries, although we still hadn't gotten our storage areas set up, so we didn't have anywhere to put the stuff. I still couldn't talk and I was starting to have dizzy spells, and I really wanted to go home to take a nap, but people kept showing up with stuff. As I was deciding that I was really leaving, I looked up to see yet another guy at the door. Chris said hi to him, so I figured maybe it was a contractor I hadn't met yet, but then he asked for me. I couldn't speak, so Jill stepped in, and we found out that this was the public safety guy. We have no idea why he came, but he was in a great mood and signed our form so we could get a business license. That meant I had to go back to the city building to file that form, and at every red light I had to put the car in park in case I fell asleep and released the brake.
Upon my return I called to find out where our chairs were (they were supposed to be delivered yesterday), and was told they'd be there in half an hour. I figured I'd wait for that delivery before going home to sleep. An hour later, I called back and was told the same thing. Another hour later I called again, and this time they said that their truck had had a mechanical failure and was unable to unload the four-ton shipment that was blocking our chairs from getting out, so we wouldn't get our delivery until Monday. I told the woman that I had been up for 80 hours and they better find some way of getting the chairs to us before 6:30 am tomorrow. She wasn't pleased with my tone. I got connected to her supervisor. He said there was no way the delivery could happen today. I said it had to happen. A few minutes later, he figured out a way to make it happen.
So tomorrow is opening day--we're doing a "soft opening" in which we'll serve people who stop by, but we're mostly using the day to finish organizing and get some pastries prepared. I was going to bake some stuff tonight, but I figured that it was getting critical that I recover my voice, so I went home and will now sleep for a little while before going back to bake (and figure out how to hang our menu, hook up our TVs, mount our business name on the exterior, salvage our accounting from the mess we've made over the past few days, etc.). We are on for Sunday--I hope you can come!
posted by The Cooking Doctor at
11:15 PM
2 Comments:
Wow! No wonder you don't have pictures (which of course we'd all love to see). Please do take care of yourself and get some sleep.
We all love you guys and are so excited for you!
You are done! That is so amazing. I would fly there if I could, however tickets from DC to CO are expensive when you book them the day of travel. I hope you are gargling with warm salt water and drinking lots. Sleep is pretty important too but not as important as opening. I am so happy for you two.
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