Those Floors @hawksbillbrew

We've written about the building Hawksbill Brewing Company will occupy a couple of times: how it was built in approximately 1911, operated as an ice storage facility for the railroad at first, then was a creamery, and eventually a string of retail establishments before we took the lease.  There's a trace of all those operations here and there throughout (some are great to find, some not so much - the graffiti left behind in one of the restrooms comes to mind!), but just like all of those before us, we need to update the building for our use - and that's going to be an ongoing blog topic for the next few months as we approach our opening.

Last weekend we set out to get the floors in shape for operation.  We had planned to simply paint them in a shade of gray, just like they had been in the past.  Once we got into the details of it, however, we discovered this wasn't going to be a simple case of painting over what was already there for consistency.

The advice we'd gotten was that while the old paint (and who knows who put it down or when, by the way) was holding, it was hard to predict what would happen to it once we got started brewing in there.  If the old paint finally failed and starting wearing away, the new paint on top of it would too...meaning future repairs and maintenance.  The prospect of taking care of issues like this would be pretty costly and complex once the whole brewhouse was in place.
So after further research, we decided to sand off as much of the old paint and then treat the concrete so that we could paint it.  David made arrangements with one of the hardware stores to rent the sander and buy a grinding wheel that we could use for the process, and set to work on it all.

It is a dusty and exhausting job - Kevin snapped this photo of him in action.  This area is about 600 square feet, and he worked at it for around 12 hours - I feebly worked on this for two or three hours so he could take a break.

Next steps with the floor in that area are to treat it so that we can paint it - that's all work we'll take care of this month, and hopefully complete before Christmas.  We'll paint the walls in January, when we'll also be installing and hooking up the brewery system.

Plenty of work to come!