Mural at Cafe Mochi

I slipped away from personal projects for a few weeks and haven't posted anything for awhile. No, I did not take flight to a southern destination. I have been right here with the rest of you, dealing with pitifully low wind chills, and more wintery forms of precipitation than I care to discuss.

But onto more pleasant topics. A while back a friend added a room onto his existing restaurant. And because I helped him with the original building, as well as it's expansion, he again enlisted me to deal with the cosmetics of this project.

The room provides another 525 sq.feet. The right hand side of the back wall, where there are no studs, is actually an opening to stairs leading down to the kitchen.

Here you can see that wall in green that leads to the stairs and the kitchen. The servers counter is to be installed along the above blank wall.

All those patio lovers needed to have somewhere to go during this very long winter.

In fact, winter came so early, the patio furniture had to be used inside while we waited for the new tables and chairs to arrive.

Here it is from the outside. The single story portion is the addition.

Weather issues stopped the progress so it will be spring before the balcony is completed. But meanwhile we are moving along inside.

Chairs and tables did arrive.

Light fixtures were hung.

and shades were installed on the windows. But this room was asking for more.

Early on I was planning something special for the long wall you see here.

It needed some pizzazz and I knew the guy who could make it happen.

I had the idea of bringing the patio view indoors. Michael Schmitz put his artistic talent into sketching ideas of how that would look.

We collaborated, mostly through emails, until we were both satisfied with the drawing.

The wall measures 8x16 so this was no small canvas. With the help of his mother, Michael snapped grid lines and dove into transferring his creation in a big way.