All posts tagged Sydney builders

Remember Kev? Well yesterday he returned to HY because the good people at Barangaroo had given him a rostered day off. I want a rostered day off, I think I’ll speak to my union…

It’s very lovely of Kev to spend his RDO helping HY get up and running, one imagines there are any number of more desirable activities than power hosing the leaky back area that’s going to become our greenhouse.

I suspect he’s so willing because when he and his mate Cill moved out here, our family outfitted their apartment with a lovely assortment of dead geriatric relatives’ china, a second hand bed from someone who had moved overseas, a bar fridge from a rich friend redoing their in-house bar and various linens so threadbare I suspect they should have become rags. And by family, I really mean my mother, who can’t bear to see waste, so stores everything in the attic at home so that when complete strangers move to her country, she can help them settle in with a second hand iron.

So really, if Kev owes anyone, it’s my mother, but Gregory and I will take his assistance and thank him on her behalf.

It was a manly day yesterday. Lots of blasting and drilling and smashing stuff. Cutting steel to protect on the edges of the bar and host stand. Some are going to be blackened, others rusted with hydrochloric acid and a sealer. Dangerous stuff that, not for the clumsy or…well, me really.

Oregon timber, barely sanded so as to feature their natural grains, being joined together to make the tables for the bar. They’re one of my favourite design elements so far.

Today is plumbing piping day.

Remember mechano sets? No one born later than 1980 would have a chance I’d imagine, but I remember spending many a rainy afternoon assembling creations that usually fell down because I have no natural instinct towards engineering.

That’s essentially what the boys are doing this afternoon. Putting together metres and metres of plumbing piping that will then be powder coated and mounted on the walls to form the support structures for our shelving. I’m really excited about it to be honest, but apparently I wasn’t welcome today.

I suspect putting it all together is going to be worse than an IKEA bookcase and anyone who’s been through that, knows that it’s an activity best divided amongst the sexes.

So I’ll let the boys be boys and I’ll get back to the women’s work…POS and accounting systems.

Oh, don’t you wish to be me.

Caption: Shut up you guys, I can’t hear myself think. Gregory in his Mickey Mouse ears, sanding back a support beam to restore it to its former glory. Boys with their toys…and facemasks. Tris protecting himself from dust and the first flu of the season. Those that stick together, stay together.

I mentioned previously our very good fortune in obtaining timber we couldn’t ever have afforded in our wildest imaginations. All for a bottle of Wild Turkey.

So Gregory and Tris (our fantastic builder) set about turning these discarded planks of wood into our shelving, banquette and my diva host stand. I am going to have a sign saying; ‘NO CHEFS ALLOWED’.

The black painted area will be covered with slats of blackened wood and we’ll use the plumbing piping to hang my light and menus from. That Ash, she’s so clever.

When we lived in LA, Gregory and I helped open a new restaurant that had four lovely booths. Four and only four.

And every Saturday night at 7.30pm I would have at least 9 parties vying for those booths which had been sat at 6.30 and weren’t going to be up for another hour yet anyway.

‘I want that booth there,’ one of the botoxed millions would say to me, her cat eyes unflinching in their determination.

‘I’m afraid that party is only on appetisers ma’am,’ I would say, ‘they won’t be up for at least another hour.’

‘But I want it.’

‘You’re more than welcome to have it when it becomes available at 8.30,’ I would say calmly.

‘But I want it now,’ she would say as if this was a perfectly reasonable request.

And so it would go until all 9 parties were unhappily sat at other tables, requesting to speak to a manager (me) about dispensation for their terrible service.

(I’ve got plenty more hospitality stories from that frontier, but I’ll save those for a rainy-er day).

But I did understand their wish. Who doesn’t love a booth? A private, cosy, special place where you’re a part of all the action, but unaffected by others.

Well, booths wouldn’t quite suit our layout so we’ve gone for something in between, something where you are still part of the action…a banquette.

Built entirely with salvaged wood with the back to be upholstered in a lovely hemp fabric Ash and I sourced from Cloth Fabric, a store in Surry Hills. (And by Ash and I, I really mean Ash. I think I went and got coffees. There was a lot to choose from. I got overwhelmed).

Now those are some fine legs. They’ll hold the lovely banquette up, a rather important feature.

All reports from the worksite are that today has been a high-productivity day. I’d love to report the same on my end but that’s a little tricky with a 16 month old and torrential rain.

We’re off to make choc-chip cookies for the workers. That should kill an hour.

Stay dry people.

When Ashley (the designer) started work on our restaurant, she made us fill out a form with lots of questions. Nothing personal, but she did want to know what our concept was. And we said;

Farm food with an urban edge. Industrial but warm. Urban yet homestead-ee. Contemporary yet warm.

Perfect, said our designer. What exactly is that?

She researched artworks (propaganda posters on display at the Guggenheim), old farming equipment (tractor seats were her original idea for bar stools, but they’re rather trendy at the moment and therefore out of our price range) and aerial shots of agriculture (you should see how the Bolivians do it).

And somewhere along the process she compiled a list of materials for us to start sourcing. One of them was repurposed wood. But it too has become a Gucci item so it was dismissed before we even began. Or so we thought…

Every now and again you catch a lucky break, and after all the nonsense we had purchasing this place, I guess we were in for a change of fortune. You see, not far from us there is a demolition site that coincidentally began just days before we first got access to the space.

Gregory approached the foreman about getting access to the lane so we could get a skip bin in to start clearing out.

‘Tell you what,’ the foreman says, ‘buy us a case of beer and you can throw it all in with ours.’

Nice huh?

‘What?’said Ashley perplexed. ‘What is that?’

‘Beer currency,’ said our builder, ‘you’ve never heard of it? It’s what keeps Australia running.’

Ashley was beginning to like our country more and more.

Dutifully Gregory delivered the case of beer along with our loads of rubbish and on one such trip he noticed long planks of thick, heavy well-worn wood. Just the thing we were looking for.

He mentioned this to Ash and Tris (the builder) who promptly inspected them to discover that they were in fact highly sought-after planks of long and lovely Oregon timber. The stuff they used to build New York, which now (when it gets pulled down for construction, gets sold for a very pretty penny).

‘Well, you’ve bought me beer,’ says the foreman, ‘how about a bottle of Wild Turkey and you can take what you like.’ A bottle, not even a case.

One lousy bottle of liquor for timber that would have cost us at least $140 a linear metre. That piece is 9 metres long. And the guy knew it’s value too, he could have sold it and had himself a very nice easter. Instead he gave it all to us and made it possible for the original design to come true. Look at that wood. Weathered, worn, with so many stories to tell.

All we have to do is give them a simple sand.

They’re going to be the shelving right the way through the restaurant, behind the bar and out the back in the greenhouse. They’ll be the planks used to build the host stand, and they’ll be the wood you prop your beer on if you sit at a bar table.

All because of a super nice guy.