mybeardpapa.com

Hi! Remember us? Sorry for not blogging for the past month. Now that things are more settled and we’ve hired more people, I’m back!

Not sure if you guys visited during the grand opening, but we worked throughout the night and were the only food pavilion open on Friday. The Thursday before the opening was monumental, because we had all of our inspections that day and everything had to work in order for us to open. Here’s what went down:

1. Plumbing Inspector - Our big nemesis who must have served in the armed forces previously and rules the Glendale plumbing department as if he were Patton himself. We called him out for inspections on Wednesday and he basically tore us apart and told us to change everything. There is absolutely no arguing with the General, so we begrudgingly complied and changed everything to his standards. On Thursday, however, our plumber was on another job and could not come out if we needed him. The inspector came by, said everything was fine, EXCEPT for one small thing on the roof. If we didn’t pass that inspection, there would be no way we were going to open, so we begged him to come back in an hour and hopefully we would have everything fixed.

So the big scramble began to find a plumber. I was running around asking the construction manager if he knew anyone, Daishin was asking random stores if they still had plumbers on site. Luckily, Peek, the children’s clothing store in front of us, were working on their restroom and their plumbers were available! At this point in time, we didn’t care about cost and would’ve paid them 10,000 cream puffs if that’s what they asked for, but they were reasonable and got right up on the roof to fix the problem. When the General came back, he actually shook our hand and said he didn’t think we could pull it off. First step complete!

2. Fire Inspector - The fire inspector was actually a really nice guy and tried to help us out as much as possible. We installed the fire sprinklers and alarms to his request, but our kiosk was still such a mess that he said he couldn’t approve us, because the kiosk didn’t look “open ready”. It definitely didn’t look open ready, because all our contractors were still sawing and screwing away. So we did what we did best: We begged the fire inspector to come back in a few hours, when hopefully everything would be done. We’ll come back to this one.

3. Building Inspector - He has to sign off when every part of the construction has been completed. Obviously it wasn’t done yet when he came by. More begging ensued.

4. Health Inspector - When she came by, everything was okay except for the biggest thing of all: We had no hot water! Our health inspector said she’ll sign off on our kiosk IF we had hot water by the time she got back. We had our electrician, who didn’t really know much about water heaters, climb to the roof and check to see if anything was wrong. He had no clue, but all of us fiddled with stuff and kept testing, and it must’ve been a miracle, but we got hot water! Someone really wanted us to open. Anyway, our health inspector came back, tested the hot water, and gave us the OK to open!

5. Caruso management - They wanted everyone off the property by 12 noon because Caruso was hosting his big party that night and everything had to be clean and everyone had to be gone. Instead of listening to them, we just closed the doors to our kiosk and kept working and basically hid whenever someone came by. We felt like we were in a really lame version of Mission Impossible.

Finally around 4:00 PM, our contractors were done with everything and we started cleaning up in anticipation of the fire and building inspectors. We tried to make everything as presentable as possible in the short amount of time that we had, and thankfully the two inspectors took pity on us and gave us the go ahead to open.

You should’ve seen how happy we were!! Even after 48 hours of not sleeping, we were too excited to rest. Besides, it was 5:00 PM and we had the Caruso party to get to at 7! Time to clean up and find a tux in 2 hours..