I Googled "Grease Trap"...

When I stopped by PJP Buttonwood this afternoon, it FINALLY looked like what I've been waiting for since last November...a HUGE MESS.

I've quickly learned that the more mess, the more stuff is getting done.  In super exciting news, we have pipes...like, we are going to have water in a few short days, pipes:

That square thing in the back corner is a grease trap...which honestly, I'm still puzzled by.  My first objection was "hey, we don't bake pies with grease!" and then I googled it and I see that it is used to filter out grease AND solids before it hits the wastewater system.  That just leaves me with the question of WHERE DOES IT GO?  Do you have to clean that thing out?  And if you do, is there a service for that?  I get this vibe that the whole grease trap thing is one of those insider secrets that no one tells you about until the whole thing backs up and $500 later, some grease trap cleaner is cracking up that you didn't know it was supposed to be cleaned out every three months.

In other major developments, our walls are starting to go from a hot mess to smooth and screaming out for Buttered Yam paint in eggshell.  If you recall, the walls were originally not finished out at the top because whomever built it assumed the tenant would put in a drop ceiling and no one would ever see the unfinished part.  Here is a before of the unfinished walls:

A sad state of affairs, no?  (And before you panic, we've had those water marks checked and all is good.)  Nonetheless, if you look at the top of the wall, you see that the drywall seams were "fire taped" and never finished out.  For the serious bank that the drywall guy charges, I was willing to make the best of it but the health department doesn't allow such shenanigans.  I have no idea how it impacts food prep, but it is waaaaay prettier when fixed:

I can't even guess what it takes to make a wall look like this, but drywall guy should be finished later in the week and it will be time for a coat of primer and two coats of Buttered Yam in the front 20 feet.  The entire rest of the wall space has to be in a plain white color and be enamel paint per health code regulations.  We will be painting that part too, but since there is absolutely nothing fun about that design scheme, I keep forgetting it has to be done.  (As a side note, the health department should reconsider their stance on the entire cream colored family of paints...so much less institutional than white and yet you can still bust someone for having dirty walls, so where is the harm?)

In completely unrelated news, our shipping container prototype arrived today and we think it is going to be completely perfect for two day FedEx delivery.  So perfect in fact that we are planning a test shipment later in the week to our Director of Publicity and Something-Else-I-Can't-Remember Charlotte in New York, NY.  If a pie makes it to Manhattan in shape that Charlotte can bless as acceptable, we plan to do a series of shipments all around the country.  In exchange, the recipient has to send us pictures of the pie upon arrival and allow us to pick your brain with a series of questions I haven't made up yet. Do you live somewhere remote or have a FedEx guy that is prone to dropping stuff or drives his/her FedEx van like the Mario Andretti of the parcel delivery world?  We need to test out all possibilities in the shipment process.  Leave a comment or email me at rebecca@pjpies.com to express your interest in receiving a box of pie in exchange for our exhaustive litany of questions about how it arrived.