Friday, another week goes by...

Another whole week is nearly gone, but I feel really good about the progress we have made. I fired the mechanical engineer that didn't come through for us. We now have a firm called Sol Chavez Engineering involved, and they are doing awesome. I wish we had found these guys from the very start. All we have left to complete are electrical and plumbing drawings, which will both be done on Tuesday. They came up with a 220# grease trap that is 23" x 31" x 41" and costs just $1500 (significantly less than other grease traps of this capacity). I am really happy to have this grease trap issue resolved. I wanted something that would fit in the building and not break the bank, which is why we were contesting the CSU Wastewater decision. Now we found something that will work for us and meet Wastewater's requirements!

As for the electrical, we are moving forward with our plans to run new service to a 200amp panel and bypass all of the old gear that is fire damaged and not to code. I took photos yesterday, but I have not edited them yet on the computer. I'll post photos sometime this weekend. My hope is that our property manager will pay for the new panel install, or at least split the cost with us. We'll have to see how that pans out. My friend Kevin Coulthurst is a master electrician, but he is working a job in Utah and we were not able to use him for this project. I spoke with him yesterday and he has some wire we need for the new service in his garage that he said I can have. It is amazing how expensive wire is these days. The cost of copper is making electrical work very expensive. Kevin's offer will be a big help!

I am meeting Ryan at the shop in a little while and we are going to 'storyboard' the cabinets and do a layout template. Based on that, we will be putting together a material list and buying what we need to custom build the cabinets. Since our construction budget is higher than expected, we are going to build inexpensive boxes and put a solid wood face frame and doors on them. That will give it a very nice look, but save on cost. We are going to go with an inexpensive hardwood (like Beech) instead of Maple for another cost savings... We are going to do custom concrete counter tops, probably in a blue color (undecided right now - blue, charcoal, or dark espresso brown). Here are some images of concrete counter tops from the Cheng Concrete Exchange website:
Click on the image to see a larger version


And this is work that Ryan has done:


Time to go...
JD