After nearly 3 years of plannings, architectural drawings, working through the permitting process with the town and mood swings from disappointment to despair, we finally begin the process of turning an empty shell of a building into our vision. The first step is to remove everything we do not need, and there is a lot of that.
The first thing we removed was the suspended ceiling. We pulled down the tiles, and the metal grid. Before we could pull down the grid, we had to rig a new method of holding up the florescent lights so we ran wire from the corners of the lights up to the ceiling joists. The lights were hanging at random and bizarre angles, but that was alright because they were temporary.
Then, we removed all of the walls that we did not need. There are not too many that fall in this category, but it did include the old bathrooms. We were able to salvage most of the 2×4’s from this portion and reuse them in the new walls. The next step was to remove the drywall on the walls that were staying. We removed only the portion of the drywall that would allow us to access the old electrical/plumbing and where we would install the new electrical/plumbing.
We opted to remove nearly all of the old electrical and redo the runs because:
- We wanted to move the electrical sub-panel
- The lights were moving and we would use low wattage LED’s which means that we could fit more lights on each circuit
- We moved the switches to suit our needs
- In the seating areas, we could max out the outlet circuits due to low demand
- We had to open up the walls for the plumbing and so we might as well make the electrical fit our needs exactly instead of a patchwork repair/replace approach.
During this phase, we began testing various lighting possibilities and decided to go with a 10 watt 6″ LED recessed light that has adjustable color temperature and can be controlled from an automated hub. When we came upon this solution, we realized that it would give us the opportunity to add other automation to the cafe such as motion sensors, door and window sensors, security monitoring and water/fire monitoring.
Then we built the new walls for the bathrooms, we moved the wall between the kitchen/prep area and the working bar area and we built the countertop frame in the bar area. We also began working on the plumbing and electrical needs.
