The Welding Begins

A guy with green hair showed up today to start putting the plates on the steel beams that will hold the roof up.

Some of the beams with the new plates.Hauling the beam up onto the saw, errr welding, horses.

The big generator for the arc welder.
The setup for the welder. I don't think I would mess with this thing, 200 amps at 220 volt.
Welding away.

Grunt Work Today

Yuck.... nothing but grunt work all day today. In order to prepare for things to come (patio and the steel beams) Devin and I had to do some major grunt work today.

This in the former long time home of the bricks that had to be re-loacted about 12 feet away. Let me tell you, I don't know how long they were there but there were some freaky creepy crawly things at the bottom of that pile.

Here is the new home for the bricks . Nothing beats lugging snow and mud covered bricks all morning :)Some of the mess Devin is making inside.

Cutting away the roof beams can land some pretty nasty stuff in your eyes.
Done for the day....

The Steel Is Here

It is frickin cold out! The guys have dragged all of the steel into the building. I can't believe that they got it done as it was about 2 deg out and slippery as heck.


These are the roof beams that we cannot bring in yet because we only had 5 people to lift them ( need about 10 :)

This is one of the roof columns that is going to hold everything else up, 5x5in steel square beams.

The 10in square plates that are going to be welded to the bottom of the columns.
A whole mess of steel. These poor guys had to haul these in from the outside in sub 0 weather... What a drag.

The Rest Of The Floor Is In

All finished.... except for the finish.

This is the concrete prior to any color added.

Mixing in the dye.

Getting there just one more coat.

The building owner helped us out by fixing the big holes out front.

The First Half Is In

The first half was poured in today and the rest should be done on moday. In addition to the floor they have touched up a few other places that needed to be fixed.

Got to get some heat in the place. It has been around 35 deg for the last few days so we have to put some extra heat in the place to get the floor to set up right.

This is the dye that will be used. It is not mixed into the concrete but is a powder that will be sprinkled on a few hours after the pour. It soaks in to about a quarter of an inch, or so I am told.

The first pour.

Working the way up.

The first half is done! Well kind of.... I could not stick around any longer to get more pictures but from this point they have to put on the tint and do a final smoothing.

The Floors

The floors and post holes for the roof supports have passed inspection!!!!

Here is the re-bar for the new floor.
The cement truck has arrived thanks to Craig's Concrete (720) 929-0316. As Craig says "That's some good mud there", give him a call for your next big concrete job.

The pads for the posts are the first to go in.

This is the mold that will divide the two colors of the floor. You can also see that all of the pads are filled in.

The Final Pack

The floor is back into place and ready for re-bar. All things set for the final pour.


Bill Keil, Master Plumber, of BK Plumbing & Mechanical (720) 290-1944 I would highly reccomend Bill for any of your plumbing, HVAC, etc projects. To date he has saved our bacon at least 5 times.

The counter drain.

Cliff from Concrete-It making sure everything is going ok.

The floor pounding unit.

The sidewalk out front.

The Pipes Are In

The waste water pipes are in the ground..... now I gotta do is go fill in the holes.


Some for the sinks
The line to the counter
The line for the 2 toilets
The recently re-modeled bathrooms.

In Comes The Plumbing

Par for the course. Now we have discovered that the bathrooms are not designed to code on the plans. Thank god it was now and not when we had built the walls and put the concrete floor in. All we have to do it this point is just lay the pipes a little bit different so we can have the space needed to be handicap accessible. There has to be a 4 foot clearance from the toilet to any object and in our case we were a couple of inches short. As you can imagine that would have been a show stopper had we put all of the waste water lines under 3 feet of concrete and road fill and then failed the inspection. Good eye Joe! (Joe Palmir general contractor 720-436-8153)

Future home of the bathrooms.

Main lines running from the counter.

Feeds to the kitchen and out to the grease trap.

The old bathroom
Floor is almost done, it should be filled in by this time next week. See ya then.

The floor work begins.

The city came in and told us that we had to pull the old floor out and put in something else. Well what is another 10 grand or so. We pulled out all of the joists and topping (2 1/2 inches think with oak hardwood in some areas) and made ready for the concret-it team, Claude and his brother Cliff, from Sun Microsystems.


The guys from Concrete-it (1-800-818-0392 ask for Claude and tell them Jason sent ya) begin to put in the fill dirt.

Lots to do, this is a hole for one of the roof support beams.

The soon to be home for the walk in. The concrete-it folks are putting in a pad so we can put the walk in back together on it.

We had to dig the entire floor out. It was a total pain in the rear. Here is where the bathrooms once were.

The fill dirt starts to pile up.

The Home Front

The POS system. I built this from off the shelf components and have put together the entire system, with printers and office equipment, for about 2/3 rds the price of the software from some big name POS vendors.


The espresso maker, under gaurd by the budder, gotta love E-Bay :)


Plates.... lots and lots of plates. We are getting all of the plates and coffee mugs from the local thrift stores.