Demolition Complete!
Good afternoon! I'm drinking the Bird Blend coffee from (NE Jacksonville's) Murray Hill Coffee Shop / Bar "The Flamingo." I'm listening to my Spotify wrapped which is mostly the K-Rock band "Drinking Boys and Girls Choir." I'm uh, finally able to type again.
Demolition took a little longer than expected.
I mean we did mostly break it down in a weekend, but overall it took about a week. We started with the cabinets and partition walls on Saturday/Sunday, which wasn't too tough outside of a little chiseling around electrical. We realized we were being super loud when our neighbors asked us to stop hammering and destroying walls next door haha. So after that first day we began working overnight.
After the weekend we had to tackle the flooring. Some of it was installed very lazily, which meant it was easy to lift up with a crowbar and toss aside. Some of it was properly sealed, which meant minutes of chiseling per tile. After something like 5-6 hours of that we were done and decided to actually move the tile to the trash another day.
Unfortunately the next morning I realized I had hurt my shoulder.
All that hammering had made my left arm, which was holding the chisel or crowbar, so swollen around the shoulder I could barely move it. It figures that after breaking a couple tools in the process I'd end up hurting myself too. So we took a couple days off and came back to do debris removal later. In that time I was mostly making phone calls because I couldn't easily type or drive.
All in all construction was pushed back another week.
Thankfully today my shoulder is fine, it wasn't totally the issue that postponed construction. That was mainly some back and forth over the terms of our agreement. I had some notes, we had some restructuring around price, I'm now trying to clear it with the property manager who's sometimes difficult to get ahold of.
Anyways, we'll still likely open either at the end of December or early January as long as everything goes well. In February of this year I made a survey on IG asking whether I should open a cafe in 2021 (more mid-pandemic); To those who said yes, you might just get your wish. :)
I'll keep working as hard as I can!
- Elias
