Renovation Pt. 4

Lately, all the work I've put into the coffee shop has been really... draining. I've been tired, and it seems like at the end of every day, there's more work, not less. More problems I don't know how to solve. (In honor of this, here's a picture of Mark looking a little down.)

However, the past couple of days, things have really been moving. It was awesome getting our speakers installed so that we can play music now while we work, we got the last of our lights installed, and the place is really cleaning up nice. Our sofas are supposed to come tomorrow, and tables and chairs should be maybe this weekend.


And overall, I'm proud of how it turned out. It's really not easy to do renovations in China. Basically I had to choose the dimensions, the design, the style, etc., for every single thing in the shop. For instance, for the bar, I needed to decide the height of the first level of the bar, the height of the top of the bar, how wide, how long, I had to draw the curve for the corners, decide what the top (as in, the part toward the ceiling) of the bar would be like, how far it would come down, how tall that part would be, what materials all these things would be made out of, draw the shelving behind the bar, etc. All using the metric system, of course. I'm lucky the place doesn't look like something out of a bad dream.


Not only that, but I had to decide every material that we used. As for wood sheets, do we buy the ones that are 40 yuan, 65 yuan, 70 yuan, 90 yuan, or 102 yuan? In case you're interested, we went with the 90 yuan ones. And I had to decide that for everything: both types of ceiling materials, the darker wood we used to overlay everything, the colored metal we used for our sign and part of the bar, the stone we used in the kitchen, the glue we used, plaster, everything. We picked it out, bought it, had it shipped to the coffee shop, and sometimes hauled it in ourselves. It took us four days to find paint and have it made, for goodness' sake (including three hours when they didn't get it right of saying, "Okay, add a little more red to that one. Now a little more green to the other one. Okay, let me look at them.").


Anyways. I thought that I would put up some more pictures, in honor of the renovations being almost completely done. Let me know what you think!