What Cannot Be Un-Seen

May the grease of a thousand meals infest your vent fan -- ancient restaurateur's curse

One word: yuck.

After sitting outside in pieces for almost four years, it was time to reinstall the kitchen vent fan. This is the thing that sucks kitchen fumes out of the commercial kitchen, like an industrial-sized version of your average hood vent.

Except that the duct is 14 inches in diameter, the fan is the size of a fifth-grader, and the motor that drives it has more horsepower than my first car. The whole thing weighs about 40 pounds, and that's not counting the grease.

The grease . Oh, the grease.

Neither the fan nor any of the ductwork had been cleaned in at least ten years, which is sort of okay, because it hadn't been used in the last six. But imagine a full-service restaurant, cooking steaks and chops and fish and chicken and who-knows-what, every evening, night after night, for years. Imagine what goes up the hood vent in all that time. And imagine where it stays.

Now imagine cleaning it. I did, but the reality was still a surprise. Old grease gets really hard and black and sticky. It laughs at Dawn and normal household cleaners. So Kathy and I went to the local restaurant-supply place and got a gallon of the good stuff. At first, we picked up a big bottle labeled stove and oven cleaner, but the owner of the store said, "Oh, no. THIS is what you want," and pointed to a different bottle. "Use gloves. And a mask."

Okay then... we're talking industrial-strength cleaner.

Even so, the grease put up a valiant fight. You pour the solvent on full-strength (no dilution) and let it sit for 20-30 minutes. The grease starts to bubble a little bit. That's how you know you don't want to touch it. Then you scrape the resulting goo off and... uh, where am I supposed to put this stuff?

Fun fact: The brush I was using to spread solvent now has no bristles. They got shorter and shorter as I worked, and now they're just... gone.

This is sort of like stripping paint, but with a worse smell. Like paint stripper, the grease solvent doesn't really make the old grease dissolve and liquefy, it just makes it sticky and gooey and marginally easier to scrape off. It turns old grease into the consistency of honey, because of course honey is so easy to remove, right?

And it makes a big, sticky, biodegradable mess. I worked over a tarp in the backyard, which (in hindsight) added the complication of blowing sand. Cleaning sand out of the honey-coated machinery made it a perfect day.

I've burned through the entire gallon of solvent and barely managed to clean everything once. The fan turns freely now, and without throwing off chunks of beef fat. I had to rebuild the AC motor, but that wasn't terrible. Now I need a fan belt to connect the motor to the fan, because the old one was rotted. I figure any ol' belt will do, so I'll see what's on sale down at the auto parts store. I hope they'll let me in.

Fight the Supression!

Raise your fist and yell, brother! We're being suppressed!

Oh, wait, no. This is actually a good thing. The fire-suppression system in the commercial kitchen was not up to modern standards. Nope. In fact, when I called the first expert to come out and look at it, he said he'd never seen one like this before. "Maybe my boss has seen one of these, but I dunno..."

Not words that inspire confidence.

Still, we weren't eager to buy a new fire system just for the fun of it, so we got a second opinion from the fire department, but they also shook their heads. That's a definite no, then.

Got three quotes from installers, picked the middle one, and got started. The old fire system had to come out first, which took a day and a half, and the new one went in, which took only half a day. The installer told me that he was frankly scared of removing the old system. Seems the big extinguisher bottle was on a hair trigger, and he was afraid that shaking it or tampering with the hardware would set it off, flooding the kitchen (and his face) with cold fire-extinguisher spray. He was happy to finally get it down off the wall, out of the house, and safely into his truck.

To me, the new system looks like a shinier version of the old system, but I'm not an expert. The law says that commercial food-preparation facilities must have a metal hood vent that extends a certain distance beyond the cooking surface(s). We had cleverly purchased our range to fit under the hood, thus complying with the regulations. But you also need a certain number of extinguisher nozzles pointed down onto the cooktop (so many per burner), and more nozzles pointed up into the vent hood, in case the fire goes up the chimney. The old fire-suppression system failed on both counts.

You trigger the system by pulling the big red handle mounted on the wall. The rules say the handle must be more than 6 feet away from the cooktop, but less than than 12 feet away. I think the idea is that you want it far enough away that it's not engulfed in the flames, but not so far away that it's hard to reach. The handle also must be a certain distance from the floor: high enough that kids don't play with it, but low enough that short people can pull it. It's a tricky game.

Pull the handle and -- whoosh! -- the system dumps an entire fire extinguisher bottle all over your cooktop and up the vent. There's no stopping it; it's an all-or-nothing deal, and it costs about $150 to refill and re-arm the system. I suspect that's where the installers make some of their money.

There's also a fusible link up inside the hood vent. If it gets hot enough to melt, it sets off the system without needing to pull the handle.

FYI, the nozzles are typically filled with Vaseline to prevent grease and dust from clogging them up. The red plastic caps then keep the Vaseline from dripping out (and into your food).

After installation, you do what's called "the balloon test." They tie party balloons over all the nozzles, put in a special dummy fire extinguisher bottle, and pull the handle. (They let me pull it.) Whoosh! If all the balloons fill up with compressed gas, you know the system is working. It's kind of festive.

Now we have to demonstrate it in front of the fire department to show them that the system works. So more balloons. Maybe I'll bring party hats.

The Great Wall of PG

You can see it from space!

As proof, I offer this high-altitude photo taken from upstairs. You can clearly see our new retaining wall in the distance, right between Oklahoma and Serbia.

The reddish oil tanker in the foreground gives you an idea of scale. The wall is an amazing four courses high, plus a buried course of foundation stones and the row of cap stones across the top.

After all was said and done, we wound up with eight leftover blocks. The rock store won't take them back, so we need to find something to do with them. We've got four big ones (75 lbs. each) three medium-sized ones (50 lbs. each), and one cap stone (55 lbs.). Anybody want to build a really small wall? Or need boat anchors?

The Smallest Room In the House

It's finally safe to go into the men's room.

After almost a year of on-again, off-again remodeling, the downstairs men's room (the one right off the commercial kitchen) is completely* finished. From the nasty, claustrophobic, little den that it was, it's now a bright, inviting... uh, men's room.

If you recall, we couldn't decide whether to save the wine-label "wallpaper" that was covering the entire room from top to bottom. In the end, we removed some of it and covered the rest. So the wine labels are still in there somewhere; they're just not on display anymore. We resurfaced all four walls (and the ceiling) with fresh new water-resistant drywall. The plumbing got pulled out and updated, both in the walls and under the floor; the electrical conduit got removed and the wires hidden appropriately; the oak floor got refinished; the ventilation fan got replaced; the ceiling light got swapped out; and all-new porcelain fixtures went in. In short, it's an all-new room in the same place as the old room.

Kathy went to work on the painting, adding almost as many colors as on the outside of the house. The bead board on the lower half is gloss black, the upper half of the walls is gray, and she hand-painted a series of horizontal black, red, and gray stripes around the top of the walls to visually lower the ceiling a bit. The room is actually higher than it is wide, so making it appear shorter is a good thing.

We found the tiniest sink we could fit into the corner, with an equally small faucet. The door still swings into the room and wants to hit the sink, so we mounted a permanent doorstop on the floor to prevent customers from inadvertently smashing the sink. I've still got to come up with some kind of lock for the door; the existing vintage lock mechanism might be confusing for people to operate.

We kicked around a lot of ideas for decorating the room. What colors do we want? What kind of decorations? Should we hang pictures, display old pieces of hardware, or leave the walls bare? In the end, Kathy found a group of vintage racing car photos that we framed and hung on each wall. They're big and oversized, and look great. I'm a fan. And the black/white photos, gray paint, red stripes, and black molding all look good against the stained hardwood floor. Our first public restroom is open for business!

*Well, almost. We need to add a small shelf to hold the hand soap and some paper towels. I give it another year.