Howdy-ho! It's been another week chock full o' painting and - in equal measure - wishing we weren't doing so much painting.* But we're close to done! Admittedly, we should be a little closer to done, but the original paint we bought for the taproom - the one whose swatches made it seem like it would be an inviting deep gold - ended up being the same color of orange that utility workers use to spraypaint cryptic abbreviations on the sidewalk outside your house.** And so, not wanting our taproom to bear such a strong resemblance to EZ Mac,*** we had to backtrack and repaint and (of course) make a bunch more trips to Home Depot.****

Moving on, in this week's News of Half-Assed Building Improvements, our heat got turned on! While this is certainly an improvement over having to paint while wearing two pairs of warm gloves, our "thermostat" at the moment is a pair of bare copper wires twisted together. This means that, in addition to having one of the least safe-seeming heating setups I can think of,***** our ludicrously-oversized heater can only be set to Full Blast, which means we get to alternate between "freezing" and "sauna" pretty regularly. There truly is nothing more glamorous than the life of a start-up brewery.

And to address the grumpy gremlin lurking in the corner, there's no real update on the permit front except that we definitely have to wait around some more. There's a hearing on December 14th at city hall that will determine whether or not we can be issued a temporary permit that will allow us to operate while the rest of the building gets its act together. So it's the Waiting Game for at least another couple weeks, but we're certainly doing everything we can to prepare the brewery in the meantime! 

It's been a week fraught with unproductive meetings,* most of which have (unsuccessfully) tried to determine if we can continue getting our unit ready while the building itself gets its act together. At the moment, we're waiting for an architect to redraw the plans and give them to the plumbing inspector (or something like that); which means we're still teetering on the cusp of being able to finish our renovations, waiting to hear word from the Powers That Be. 

But! There is a silver lining! There's a decent amount of work we need to do that doesn't require permits, and the building inspector was fairly vocal about not caring what we do on that front. So we're taking advantage of this lull to pretty up the brewery! And - in true Bone Up fashion - we're currently on day four of a project that we originally assumed would take "most of an afternoon." 

In our defense, making the brewery presentable ended up being a more formidable task than we'd anticipated.** We'd originally thought we'd just need to throw a couple coats of paint on the wall, but after spending a couple days at the business end of a caulking gun,*** blowing through a pile of cans of insulating foam, and making enough trips to Home Depot so that all the employees know us by name (and hide when we come through the door), we got a solid amount of stuff done! ...while managing to put up surprisingly little paint (you know, the one thing we set out to do). ​

But we did notice that the building inspector seemed a bit... hesitant when dealing with us,** and that's seldom an encouraging sign when dealing with city officials. Remember the lack of permits that we mentioned last week? Well it turns out that in addition to not having the building permits for the work that's been going on (which is already kind of a big deal, apparently), our landlord didn't have the permits that are necessary to apply for said building permits (because of course that's a thing). And - go figure - there are more than a few people in city hall who are less than pleased about this situation, which ends up having a direct effect on us. 

So... that's a huge bummer. We might still be able to get some things done while this all gets cleared up (that's up to the building department, who may not be feeling the most charitable right now for reasons I've already mentioned), but it's definitely a pretty big delay since the hearing isn't for at least a month. Admittedly, this is hardly the first or the longest delay we've run into,*** but we thought we were this close to being able to Get Down to Business. And now that's been pushed back. We had no real way of knowing this was going to come up, so we're pretty bummed about the whole thing, but we'll just keep movin' along in any way we can.  

And! Just so we don't end on a total downer, we got a new door! Sure, it's just a fire exit that leads out to the part of our parking lot that's mysteriously filled with dead tree branches, but there's nothing more exciting than fire safety. 

What's more, we've started meeting with some people in city hall in order to get our inspections inspected so we can finish pushing our paperwork. In fact, we met with some folks from the building department earlier this week and it went better than we'd been expecting! That's... actually sort of depressing when you consider the number of times we heard phrases like "code violation" or "nobody had a permit to do this," but it's still (arguably) progress! If nothing else, we're finally at the point where we can start finding out all the new and exciting construction projects that we'll need to do before we can legally open - after all, things at Bone Up Headquarters just wouldn't feel the same if we went two whole weeks without more unexpected delays!

I kid. Sort of.*** Things really are movin' along - we even got our ventilation system delivered! Admittedly, it would have gotten installed already if we "had our building permits," but how hard could it be to get those? We'll be all sorts of ventilated in no time at all!