Construction Game Plan for Q4 2021
Hey Happy Saturday, I'm crunched in a seat downtown for River City Pride, listening to the new car seat headrest album, and drinking an Anaerobic Costa Rican from Black and White Roasters. It tastes suuuper strong like cinnamon whole wheat bread and red fruit, delicious!
I feel very fortunate to get the chance to try this coffee for a reasonable price via Brew 5 points. I'd encourage you to read more about it at the link above, Black and White with their signature small bags and panda logo always do an exceptional job sourcing and roasting, but it can be a little pricey to pick up for yourself whole bean.
I met with a few people this week, our highway sign is up, and I've officially got 20 pages of working notes, but today I just want to focus on the big stuff.
This week we worked out a construction game plan for the rest of the year!!!
This is subject to change but I thought it'd be fun to break it down as I understand it now, since the biggest question I obviously get is "when do you open?" Most of that is dictated by our paperwork, so let's dive into it.
The first step is submitting our Architect Permits & Certificate of use (COU, this also acts as a change of use in my case) to the city for review. Which you can do at the same time to avoid scheduling multiple meetings. Once submitted these can take 6-10 weeks to get back. It's not uncommon for a resubmittal to be necessary, or for it to take that full 10 weeks. I'm doing all I can now to avoid having to submit again by going back and forth with our project manager and architect and engineer to make sure our bases are covered, I'm hoping they're ready to submit this to the city next week. meaning we get them back and signed off on, in Early December.
The second step is to begin construction. I don't need city approval/permits to do most of the work so we can start after about 6 weeks near Thanksgiving, and hope we get to the permit-mandatory work about halfway through a couple weeks afterwards in early December. I'm going to begin demolition on my own first, taking down the walls and flooring (leaving the bathroom alone for contractor use). Then we'll have our contractors pick it up from there with plumbing, electric, and bar build-out. Meaning I have a good month and a half to choose our contractors based on what we're quoted. I'm hoping for a 30-45 day build out.
The third step is taking the city's notice of commencement, and providing that to the property for their letter of authorization, which will be on site during construction as we do the work that the city will be checking in on.
After that comes the fun stuff
Bringing in equipment, furniture, decorations. We'll get to demo our menu and workflow. I'd like to train one employee to begin with and get a feel for our pace. I'm working on paperwork for Standard Operating Procedures and expectations now, among other things as we plan out the rest of the year. It feels like I'm finally on pace to having everything read which is really cool. Looking forward to sharing more here as we have it.
Thanks for reading, -Elias
