Finds

While the floor debacle continues, we went to visit Bernard from Lost Vintage. It was through him that I got the bowling alley flooring that I used for the tables and bar at Lawrence. We got into a silly phone argument three years ago, I hung up on him and have not spoken to him since. Until now. How to put it nicely? He is pretty crazy. He won’t phone you back. He’ll forget that you spoke before. He’ll forget the price quoted. There are no prices anywhere on the site so you need to get to him and get him to tell you what he wants for stuff. And he’ll fly off the handle if you blink funny. But he is passionate about what he does, loves his job, loves his finds. He has tons of stuff in warehouses and containers outside of the city and a huge warehouse in town. It is a massive jumble of great and trash and totally random. We need stools for the counter and he has the best prices in town. So to Bernard’s we went. And he had no memory of who I was. I didn’t remind him and he probably wouldn’t have cared if he had remembered.

Bernard

We got 8 of these. For now, I think we’ll leave them grey but he had some painted army green on his site & they looked beautiful.

I spotted this table under a ton of stuff that will do nicely for the coffee maker.

A little swing garbage can in creamy white

There is potentially a bench for the waiting area and other maybes, but for now I’m pretty pleased with our loot.

In other news, we got our lamps back from Lambert & Fils. They look amazing and I am so super psyched about the big one that will go over the giant maple table. We had them paint it and I admit to feeling a little nervous as I hadn’t seen the colour (other than on the spray can cap). My friend Rory did the spray paint job and it looks perfect!

  Before

   After

In the continuing saga of the Lawrence terrasse news, we have submitted our fourth (!) plan to the city permit office. One of my bestest friends ever happens to be an architect, Erica Goldstein. Super talented. Very smart. Great person. Great mom. She is like a sister. She has been making us drawings and we keep submitting them and the nice lady at the city office keeps sending them back with teeny changes. My favourite change request came today when she asked that the entrance to the patio be 1.8 meters (Who works with meters? So annoying). Erica had made the entrance 0.9 meters based on the city’s documentation on their website. THEIR rules on THEIR website. Apparently the regulation was amended 3 months ago. Good to know. Anyhow, due to all the nutty city rules (i.e. leaving 6′ clear on the 10′ sidewalks for pedestrians), we need to build what is basically a long enclosed pen. Like for cattle. Cattle with good taste. My worry was that whatever material we used for the pen would eat up our already mini space. Then a week ago as I was leaving my house I noticed that the building they are gutting on my corner has these pretty great balcony railings.

                   Love how they aren’t fancy, swirly or too pretty

It occurred to me that they would make for a cool patio railing. I made a deal with the foreman to buy the railings that he was otherwise going to bring to the dump. So for 250$ he’ll cut them into eight foot lengths and give me 40 feet. I was worried the city would say no. I mentioned how re-using this meant-for-the-trash-heap railing fell in line with the philosophy of the restaurant: using local product, no waste, using all parts of an animal, etc. A bit of a stretch – comparing the delicious food that Marc cooks to an old balcony railing on a decrepit building, but again, business is business and I had to get ‘er done. Luckily the nice permit lady said that they would allow us to use this unorthodox solution. Small victories…

The floors, meanwhile, are being sanded and painted and they are not what I want but hopefully will just disappear into floor and not be FLOOR. As we used to say in my set-dec film days :” If anyone in the audience is noticing the *fill in the blank* (in this case, “floor”) it means the script and acting suck.” So hopefully, the only people noticing the floor will be the five people reading this and everyone else will love the space and the food we are selling. In fact, I’m sure of this. We are not selling floor. We are selling food. And maybe some cute tote bags.
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