"Yes...good day" - London Underground

This past week has all been job site work, as you can see. For this job, I was playing the part of Stewie Griffin. Playing the part of Brian Griffin was my buddy and former Sticks co-worker, Terry Reeves. It cannot be overstated how important Terry was to this job. I can't wait to work another installation with ya...




Here we are at the London Underground pub in Ames, Iowa. Our job was to remodel a space that was formerly a kitchen area in one of the former incarnations of the building. This entailed stripping the walls of their greasy stainless steel sheets, facing the walls in wood and fabricating a built-in booth.




Walls are bare, and here's our canvas. The one thing that was a challenge on this job is that absolutely nothing was square, plumb or level in the area. But, that's to be expected with old buildings and renovation work.




The exhaust hood has been sheeted and the booth has been framed.




Car siding has been installed; this really warmed up the area.




Here's the "inside" of the exhaust hood after it had been sheeted with 1/4" birch ply. All of these seams require custom-made trim pieces I'll have to do in the shop this coming week. Yep, none of those angles are the same...not even close.




"Yes, good day," says Terry. He's framing up the corner of the L-shaped booth. The backrests of the booth are reclined approximately 5 degrees. This angle is carried through the curved transition. Getting this to work took some trial and error and a whole lot of patience. Unfortunately, the bartenders will be cleaning up dust from our kerfing session for many months to come. I'm thrilled with how this portion of the job came out. It's a nice detail you really don't see too often. Good job, T-bone!

Terry could also be smiling due to the fact that we ate at Great Plains Sauce & Dough everyday this week for lunch.






The other really nice detail of this job is the scribing of the booth cap to the car siding Terry did. Talk about meticulous...

Next week, everything will get stained and receive a coat of polyurethane. Tables and a "hinged" bookshelf remain to be fabricated. Right now, the focus is to get the space back to a functional state.

Many, many thanks go to Jess Clyde and Brian Dingeman at the London Underground. We totally appreciate your trust and vision on this project.