Food Cart Project Part XVII: Shelving, Counters, Floor Tile, Etcetera...

More forward progress was made on the cart this weekend. To start with, I mounted some shelving hardware:

Which, as might reasonably be expected, led to shelves:

I also built the remaining counters. These three will be against the cooking wall, and, once given some paint and formica, will house mise en place, induction burners and deep fryers (and, underneath those, a convection oven and an immersion circulator). Yes, I know the third one is backwards; I somehow didn't notice that as I was taking this shot, and I'm not going back to re-compose it...

While it was nice to get those counters out of the way, the biggest accomplishment of the weekend, by far, was installing the flooring:

The floor represents a bit of a turning point for me. Before the floor, this whole thing wasn't much more than a plywood box on wheels. Now that it's in, though, there's no longer any visible plywood anywhere on the cart, outside or inside, and it's become a kitchen waiting to come to life. I can't help but look at that as kind of a big deal. There's a certain "kitchen" quality that wasn't there before...

The flooring, by the way, is what's called VCT, which stands for vinyl composition tile. I needed two boxes of it for my square footage, so I decided to get one each of black and white and do the classic checkerboard pattern. If you do a Google image search of "VCT patterns," you'll find that people get really creative with this stuff... I did not. But I'm happy with the way it turned out. VCT is very easy to work with, but there's one thing to be aware of, should you ever find yourself installing this kind of flooring. The tiles, while perfectly square, are not perfectly flat. Each one will have a slight bow to it, and you want to install it such that the corners are bowing downward, and not upward. Apart from that, though, like I said, it was a breeze to install. You might notice, by the way, that the trim I put in last weekend has been painted. I went with a glossy white.

My food cart, of course, is not the only project in the works at Civilian Studios. There are upwards of forty artists and artisans who rent space here; everyone from painters to sculptors to jewelry makers to motorcycle builders to woodworkers. My neighbor Austin is currently working on this bonsai stand. I'm quite fond of this piece. Austin's a wizard at bookmatching veneer, and I really dig the Greene & Greene references he has going on here. Very nice work...

So, a productive weekend for sure. Still no ceiling/roof yet, that's on next weekend's agenda, as well as putting the finishing touches on the business plan and talking to the bank about a loan... Stay tuned!