Opening?

We are quickly approaching our opening day.
And we've gotten a lot of help from a lot of great people.
The place is shaping up nicely!

and we just got our exit signs installed!

building it up

Thank you to Mr. Jeffrey Kauffman for picking up where the Women In Trades left off (their class ended and our stage wasn't completed). He has taken on the task of completing the stage on his own - and it looks (and sounds) GREAT!
We also started installing all our kitchen / bar equipment. We have our bar sinks / well (with running water!)
As well as all our sinks and dishwasher in the kitchen! Turns out, our dishwasher was made for different wattage than what we had planned, so we have to get some rewiring done (boo).
Over the weekend we also finished the painting. Here's our mezzanine walls. Lookin' good! (view of mezzanine from the stage)


And here's a picture of Arlo, being cozy in bed. He's being a great little guy for getting a lot less attention while we spend a lot of time building our new home.
Thanks to everyone for all the hard work over the weekend. 5 days and counting until we open the doors!

lights!

We have our emergency egress lights installed, so when the power goes out - there will be more light than there is during the day inside our theater. We still have to test them before we start taking some away... but sheesh, seeing six on one wall is a bit much.
We also began the daunting task of painting the mezzanine. We decided to go with the yellow/golden color because it only takes one coat (the brown and red both take two or three). Lets just get this place open already!

Also - have you ever wanted to see what a big box of curtains looks like? Something like that - and it weighs a thousand pounds.

the waste place

For the ladies


and For the Men


Sorry dudes, ladies need more room to stretch out and relax in the water closet.

moving forward

Another full day put in at the theater, after half a day of work. We put in a heck of a lot of the floor (I'd say we're at 80% coverage now)
Put another coat on the red walls (some places could still use another one) David and Stephanie helped get the gold wall started and completed! It all looks so great. After another round of red paint, we'll be ready for business. Actually, we'll need to install all of our equipment and finish the stage first, but you know what I mean.

floor please!

We laid down about 25% of the floor last night. We got the bathrooms up to the front of the bar (6 feet out? Maybe more? I don't know...) It was another late night. I didn't get to the space until 9:30 pm and Stacey and I worked until 6:15 am. Thanks to Kathryn, Nate, Ashley, Bri and Stephanie for the help and making it fun.

btw: This is the video I was talking about last night:

more paint!

Pictures of the work done this weekend.

Now in COLOR!

As of Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 9 pm, the Curious Theater has its first coat of paint!

someone's a good boy

Because we've been spending so much time at the space, we feel like we're neglecting our good little guy. He came with us the first half of Saturday and he was a great little boy.

weekend paint part two

After spending thursday night prepping, Friday - beginning at 10am we started to prime and lead up to painting the floor. We had a lot of people stopping by to help us out, Bill, Noah, Nate, Ashley, Hillary - There was a lot of work that needed to get done (seems like a recurring theme here).

But, after all the work was put in, Stacey and I began to paint the floor around 1:30 am. Instead of sealing it, or staining it - we decided to paint it (a cheaper way of doing both of those things) - I mean, we sealed the cracks, but the floor surface we decided to paint. We may end up putting some flooring down - and we will have sections of carpet down, so this is by no means the final look of the floor of our space... just the first step. We finally left at 6:30 am Saturday morning.

prepping to paint

You know what you have to do in order to paint your space?
CLEAN IT UP. You know how long it takes to clean up after you've installed drywall?
A LOOOOONG time. Originally we had planned on sweeping and mopping the floors and getting our first coat of paint down on the floor tonight (we decided to go with paint instead of sealing it, or stain, or wood. We'll have some carpeting) But we couldn't because we had to do fifty other things in order to prep the space for a good painting like filling in the seams: Our cement floors have little gaps, so we had to caulk them in before painting. None of us are professional floor finishers, so it took us a little bit of time before we realized we should tape either side of the seam and caulk down the middle. It worked very well!
We spent a good six and a half hours in the space prepping for paint. We plan on going back tomorrow morning, putting another hour or two in for prep - then finally laying down the first coat of floor paint.
We'll be spending the rest of the weekend priming and painting everything else.

Drywall

We got our walls covered all the way down from the floor. Seeing as how our plumbing and electricity have passed city inspection - we're ready to seal it up, paint it, and open this bad boy.
The next step is to sand it all down, complete the priming and paint... and at some point we have to clean up to finish the floors. Still a little ways out, luckily we've got a lot of great folks ready and willing to help us finish the priming and begin the painting. We've got color decisions to make (as well as flooring) - so we're getting on that!
and we're very pleased with the progress! The doors will be opening soon enough!