Bringing Home the Hardware

A lot of the "remodeling" lately has had less to do with making the house livable, and more with outfitting the business. Which isn't to say it's been easier...

Exhibit A is the collection of pots, pans, dishes, and glassware we've accumulated over the past few weeks. It's like moving to a new house after all your old stuff was lost in a fire or something. We need cooking utensils, forks, knives, and spoons for 30+ people, spatulas, mixing bowls, cutting boards, and so on. And most of the new stuff has to be NSF approved for commercial foodservice, so we can't just pop over to Costco or Target or Amazon and get what we want.

Instead, we've set up accounts with a handful of big foodservice distributors and have starting raiding their catalogs for hardware, like these pots and pans. The biggest surprise -- they're cheap! Most commercial stuff is stupidly expensive, but this 10-inch aluminum saucepan with the red handle was just eight bucks! (Actually, the handle was not included, and cost an extra $2.95.) Heck, for that price I can afford to ruin a pan a month and still stay in business. My next step is to season them all, which promises to use up a lot of vegetable oil and produce a lot of smoke. Should be fun.

Over in the "front of the house" (see, we're learning restaurant lingo) Kathy has assembled all the dishes and dinnerware we need. Every few days the UPS driver brings us a carton or two of bulk wineglasses, or plates, or those little ceramic sugar-packet holders. I never paid much attention to that stuff when we're eating out. Now we've got to find it all and bring it in-house. And find someplace to store it.

Some items seemed oddly expensive, like salt and pepper shakers, compared to wineglasses, which are pretty cheap. I'll remember that the next time I'm tempted to swipe goods from a restaurant table. And we found some beer glasses that can double as water glasses (we'll likely serve more of the latter than the former).

And of course, we have teapots. Lots and lots of teapots. The lids on these ones stay on pretty well, so we don't expect too many messy accidents.

The biggest downside to all this is the packing material. We've been going through a lot of cardboard boxes lately. Too many for our garbage company to handle, so we accumulate cardboard out in the backyard, where it gets wet overnight. A weekly chore is cutting up soggy cardboard and stuffing it into the recycling bin. Nobody told me the new business would be like this.