The Key to Happiness is Low Expectations

Well hello there! It sure has been a big week around here at Bone Up! First off, we got the chance to meet some of the fine folks down at city hall, and they've been mighty welcoming every time we've talked to them. One of the people we met with was rather insistent that the mayor would be at our grand opening! The mayor could not be reached for comment on this issue (we assume that his promised attendance at our brewery would be news to him as well). 

Furthermore, this here marks the second week in a row that our building has seen real, actual, progress! As regular readers of this blog have heard a few times before (and as you've heard at length if you've run into us in the wild, particularly after we've had a drink or two), we've had some issues with our roof which have delayed some of our buildout by weeks and possibly months. We've tried not to harp on it too much, but that thing has been the bane of our collective existence for some time now so it's hard not to bring it up from time to time. But not anymore! Maybe! After redoing the damn thing for what might be the third or fifth time, the roof has at the very least stopped leaking on days when it isn't raining (we currently can neither confirm nor deny whether or not it leaks when there is rain, but that's fine for now. Baby steps). It might not sound like much to get excited over, but a lot of our other renovations had to be put on hold until that got done. But now things can really get moving - as we speak we're getting some new flooring put in, and they've taken most of that big stupid metal thing* off of our ceiling!

Never before has the sight of dry plywood been so exciting to us.

And that's not all! While Jimbo was out prettying up our sign,** she noticed that something about the outside of our building seemed... different. On further scrutiny, it turns out that the trash pile was gone! 

We almost didn't recognize the place without the mountain of discarded pallets out front.*** 

We've been promising for months that we would turn our building into something "less completely terrifying" and maybe even "not abandoned-looking" and we're finally moving forward on those promises! Exciting times!

Admittedly, finding a steak knife in one of the ceiling supports was kind of a step backwards in the "less terrifying" goal.

Speaking of which, have you ever looked at an old museum or something and thought "this place must be a huge pain to dust?" We assume you have not, because you aren't Marge Simpson. But it's something that probably should have crossed our minds when we fired up the air compressor and took to blowing dust off of the fixtures in order to make things - to use Jared's words - "less grossnasty".**** See, our building used to be an industrial laundromat, and when you cross huge amounts of lint production with a bunch of old wooden rafters, you end up with a bit of a situation on your hands. And by "a bit of a situation" I mean that Jared created the world's biggest indoor dust cloud and then spent the next two days reading up on the symptoms of/checking himself for signs of white lung***** (Jared does not have white lung, this time he actually wore his respirator like a smart person). 

Just looking at this picture makes me start coughing. But it's (mostly) all gone now!

*OK fine, it actually looked pretty cool. But it was very in the way, which is why we're prone to calling it names. 
**Bay door
***They actually might have just organized the pallets and put them off to the side, but it still looks way better. Now instead of our parking lot being a dirt patch filled with weeds and trash, it's a dirt pile surrounded by neatly organized trash. Like I said, baby steps. 
****Well, "grossnasty" is probably copyright Ryan North, but you get the idea.
*****The respiratory condition, that is. Not the band.