Our convection ovens, hand sinks, freezer, ranges and mixers were delivered this week.

I haven’t been contributing much to the blog lately, and wondering why. I write a great deal about the building, green construction, and our event space and shared kitchen; but the work that any new business must undertake to open its doors is staggering. So here’s a behind the scenes, not so pretty list of items I’ve not mentioned before. They have required a great deal of time and consideration apart from design or construction over the past couple of months:

1.) Line up post-construction insurance policies
2.) Draft event space agreement – in review with attorney

Stainless steel prep tables and our high temp/low water dishwasher were delivered to the kitchen today. Other big equipment, including our convection ovens and ranges, will be in next week.

Zina will be speaking about Logan Square Kitchen next week at the North Logan Block Club. The meeting takes place Tuesday, June 30th at 7 pm at St Luke’s Lutheran Church in the assembly hall. 2647 N Francisco @ Schubert

It’s time for all our salvage doors to be put back in service. What fun! All these doors were headed for the landfill, and they are beautiful, turn-of-the-century, oak, maple, pine, dark, light, skinny, fat– you name it! We are covering the north wall just inside our entrance. This type of feature would never be possible without first, the vision of Jean Dufresne our architect. He saw this wall over a year ago, and has been working on its refinement throughout construction.

This week new wall paneling was put up in the kitchen. We used Acrovyn 3000 wall protection in ‘ocean gray’ which is a light gray-green color. These panels are PVC-free, which means they do not contain a dangerous plastic that is detrimental to our health and environment. Acrovyn 3000 is also LEED Silver Certified, recyclable, and class 1 fire rated.

I received a revised schedule from our contractor this week; we are waiting for our very special light fixtures for our dining room. They help us achieve a 35% energy reduction in our lighting use. (they better, they cost enough!) Anyway, we are looking forward to construction completion the latter part of July.

We’ve completed another milestone in our LEED certification process. We’ve provided all clarification requests made by the review team concerning our design submission. 25 of our 38 credits we’re attempting for a LEED Gold rating are related to building design.

Check out our new video of Crane Day. All of our air units were delivered at the end of May and put on the Logan Square Kitchen rooftop with a giant crane. Watch the video here.

I gave tours to a few different friends yesterday; one was kind enough to snap a shot of me outside the Kitchen. I’m holding a fabric sample of our future theater curtain that will hang in the dining room. I’m so happy to be showing the space to friends that mean so much to me; it’s a little overwhelming that after two years, our doors are close to opening!

Our new kitchen floor was poured last week. The charcoal color is really beautiful with a navy hue to it. The non-slip floor, derived from castor beans, is from a company called Dur-a-flex.

I think this is a beautiful photo. Our team was preparing the kitchen for its new floor. The floor that is poured over our concrete slab will harden with a pebbled surface. It’s made from rapidly renewable materials like castor beans. Can’t wait to see the finished floor in a couple of days.

Logan Square Kitchen is starting to look like real a kitchen these days. The enormous 9 and 16 foot hoods were hung in the kitchen last week.

From more than 2,500 nominated projects, Logan Square Kitchen (submitted by SPACE Architects + Planners LLC) has been selected as a Green Building of America Award-winning project and will be featured in the upcoming special Real Estate & Construction Review-Midwest Green Success Stories edition.