The electricity is done! Well, the wiring is done anyway. Now we await the inspector. The point is we got our own juice and we can start putting in lamps, and plugging stuff in.

If you are in Los Angeles and need an electrician I highly recommend Roberto Orion Galarpe and his all Tagalog speaking pirate crew. Call me for their info. The job was very expensive but a third of what other electricians wanted to charge.

We also got to see what Ba will look like at night with electric lights. That was pretty exciting.

The framing is done!. The kitchen, wait station and bathroom walls are built. The kitchen looks tiny, and the women’s room looks humongous. Ironically the bathrooms both may need to be made larger to be up to code.

This week Katie H put down her telescope and picked up a hammer. She spent two days with Manny and me using an air hammer to finish all of the framing.

Now I wait for the inspector, and if our work pleases him we will have permission to begin the water lines.

I guess business is slow on the South China Seas because I was able to hire these guys to do my electricity for a fraction of what you would expect. They are very comfortable on ladders and really know how to wire. They shared a lunch they brought that had  three kinds of pork. Mostly all good.

If we are lucky the inspector will come tomorrow for our final electrical inspection. I hope he speaks Tagalog.

The city electrical inspector has passed our new meter! Probably doesn’t sound like much to you, but it is a humongous deal to me.

So a new electrical meter costs four thousand dollars, but here’s the weird  thing: you get the meter for free from DWP, it is the metal box that you install it on that costs so much. And it is an empty metal box! It is a very specific shape, granted, but it is still a stamped out steel box.

Four thousand bucks.

Damn.

My electrician Roberto Orion Galarpe points to the expensive metal box for the inspector who is wearing an “I heart Jesus” lanyard.

The walls are closing in on me! Literally. Today the first wall went up at Ba! Julia, with Mjølnir, the hammer of Asgard, Manny and I, framed what will become the wait station and then the kitchen wall. Suddenly the space is very real, and my kitchen is very small. So is the dining room of course, but you hopefully will think it’s intimate. My kitchen is just small. Oh well. Five years will go by in no time.

Ann Marshall came by to show us some graphics she designed for the Ba logo and menu’s and stuff.

Then later Colin O’Mara Green stopped by to help Manny and I getting the kitchen wall laser level and scientifically accurate.  

The building material arrived today!!! 50 sheets of 5/8 fire code drywall, 60 8′ 2×4’s, studs, jacks, headers, and cripples.  190 feet of copper pipe (type L, thank you), 100 ft of black iron pipe  (gracious!).  Truck arrived at 10:30 and unloaded with a fork lift.

Since my 21-year-old assistant was nowhere to be seen I started moving in the lumber myself. A teenager from the block saw and offered to help…..after lunch. I hired him on the spot, but he never returned.

And it was, like, 110º f today at noon!!!    Anyway, I got it all moved by 3:30 by myself.

I Feel like a badass.

The building Ba is in was built for a bakery in 1921. It was commissioned by a baker and the walls were built around the oven. The flue door was built into the outside wall to regulate air going into the oven. The bakery was such a success another room was built on to it.  That is the room Ba is in. So the old outside door to the oven is inside our space.

This building has been baking bread every day for ninety years. Mr Vargas, our landlord, is the second owner of the building. The first owner had turned this room into a cafe in the ’60’s. It had booths, and a jukebox, and a kitchen where ours will be. Lots of the older people in the neighborhood remember it fondly. In the 70’s Mr Vargas turned the space back into a bakery and had people working here around the clock. But in the ’90’s the big super market chains started doing their own baking in factories and that hurt the mom and pop places like this very badly. So this room was not used much till I asked to rent it. But it must be easier to just take a check from me then bake that much worth of bread.

We have to take this oven door out of the wall to build our kitchen and that makes me very sad. We will put it back someplace else though.

James B stopped by today and helped Manny and I re-do the gas lines. We wrenched out 20 feet of the old bitter, ossified 2 inch black Iron pipe and started fitting on the new clean brass fittings that will bring gas to the Ba kitchen. We were feeling very manly at the end of the day.

Gillian Stern that’s who.

When you come to Ba for dinner and you are lucky enough to sit at the Gillian Stern table, know that it is named after one of the most educated, and least risk averse people I have ever met.

Gillian’s birthday is February 22nd, and she likes books, tickets, good food, and wine.

It is done. The floor is poured. Matt Dressler, Chris Wagganer, Manuel, me, and two cement pros I hired: Ruben, and Francisco, poured 9,000 pounds of concrete. That’s dry weight.  We started at 9:00 a.m., rented the small mixer from home depot and by noon we had already gone through 70 bags of concrete. So in the noon sun Chris, Matt and I went back to buy and haul 32 more bags. That was painful.

By 5:00 it was done! It is settling in some places by 1/4″ but otherwise, I think it is looking pretty sweet. The total cost of the floor, and the drainage system came to about $5,300. That is quite a bit lower than the first bid we heard of $20,000. DIY power!    However, if I had paid myself even minimum wage the final cost would be closer to like, a  million.

Now we can build the walls!