Building Vineyard Cafe, Week 1: Stripping the Roof

Construction kicked off with a mighty blow (or is that several not so mighty ones? ;) ) swung from Will’s hammer. For your enjoyment we even videoed it.

(The video was on YouTube, where it has since been made private, so it can no longer be shown here.)

The first task was to strip the old ceiling back to the beams and take out the walls we didn’t want.

This post first appeared on the Vineyard Cafe blog on 2 May 2006 ("Construction Begins"), with the week's photo album. Vineyard Cafe was the restaurant I opened in a Beijing hutong in 2006 with Will and Xuduan, and while we built it we kept a blog and a weekly photo album of our progress. The blog is long gone, so I have brought it back here. See the whole Vineyard Cafe story.