The Cantina renovation,
summer 2024.
Former auto repair shop on E. Pikes Peak Ave. Sat empty two years. Asbestos abated 2023. Nine weeks of evenings and weekends, May through July 2024, while we still ran the original Mash Mechanix slot during the day. What we built ourselves, what we paid pros for, the $18k floor-pour surprise in week 5, and the soft-launch Aug 2 → hard launch Aug 9 that put us on the map.
A former auto repair shop on E. Pikes Peak Ave.
The building was an auto repair shop for thirty-something years — two roll-up bay doors, one office, one rest room, one parking lot, all of it painted the same transmission-fluid beige. The shop closed in 2021. It sat empty two full years. The landlord ran asbestos abatement in spring 2023 because the original ceiling tile and a run of pipe insulation tested positive, and the certificate of clearance landed late that fall. We walked the space for the first time in February 2024.
First walk-through was honestly not promising. The floor was a sea of cracked epoxy with grease-darkened seams. The HVAC was a single rooftop unit that had not run since the abatement crew shut it off. The rest room was one toilet, no ADA clearance, a sink that drained into a bucket. The office was the only square footage that looked like indoor real estate — the rest looked like a garage that someone had stopped maintaining and then stopped using.
The lease terms were the reason we signed. Below-market rent for the first eighteen months, the landlord covering the demising wall and the roof patch, a five-year option with a fixed renewal rate. The kind of lease you only get on a building that has sat empty long enough that the landlord wants someone — anyone — in the door before the next winter. We were that someone.
The smoker stack fit. The lot held three trucks.
Two things made us sign. First — and this is the kind of detail that turns a building from a maybe into a yes — the smoker stack fit through the existing roof vent. The auto shop had run a fume exhaust through a 14-inch boot in the roof. Our stick burner needs a 12-inch stack with a 14-inch curb. The plumbing was already there. We did not have to cut a new hole through a 2021 metal roof. We did not have to fight the city for a roof penetration permit. The hood ventilation permit for the kitchen still needed pulling (more on that in §05), but the smoker stack was already a solved problem the day we walked in.
Second — the parking lot held three trucks. The math on a flagship BBQ joint is mostly about whether you can move two briskets per minute during the lunch rush and whether the brewery-truck team can park their vehicle inside your own footprint when they pull back for the night. Three full-size pickup trucks fit comfortably with room for a 14-foot trailer along the fence line. That meant the Mash Mechanix slot we were still running during the day (see the Mash Mechanix partnership and from trailer to flagship) could keep its trailer here on off-days without eating into the dining-room footprint. One address, two operations, no double rent.
The third thing — and we list it third because we try not to lead with romance — was the room. The shop floor was 2,400 square feet under twelve-foot ceilings with exposed steel joists. The kind of bones you cannot build into a new construction at a price a BBQ joint can pay. We did not want a strip-mall box. We wanted a room that already had a personality the dining-room build-out could lean into instead of fight. The auto shop had that.
Nine weeks, May through July, mostly evenings.
We signed the lease in late April 2024 and started demo on May 4. Hard target was a soft-launch the first Friday of August. That gave us nine weeks. We held to it — barely — with one expensive week 5 detour we’ll get to in §06. The schedule was evenings and weekends because we were still running the original Mash Mechanix slot during the day. Service at the brewery from 11 to 2, prep cleanup until 3, drive across town, swing a hammer until 9. Saturdays were all day on the build.
The phasing went demo (weeks 1–2), framing and rough mechanical (3–4), the unscheduled concrete pour (5), drywall and rough finish (6–7), hood install and final mechanical (7–8), inspections and FF&E and a stocking week (8–9). We did not have a general contractor. We had a project manager — my brother-in-law, who runs commercial roof tear-offs and reads a critical path the way pit cooks read a probe — and we hired each subcontractor direct. It saved roughly 18% on bid spread. It cost us every evening of those nine weeks.
The crew on the build was thin. Three of us most evenings — me, my husband, my brother-in-law on the nights he could break free from his day job — and a rotating cast of two or three friends who would come trade a Saturday for a brisket sandwich and a beer. That math sounds romantic. It was mostly tired. I do not recommend running a full-service food truck and a flagship build simultaneously unless the alternative is missing the lease window. Ours was.
The pit hood. The host stand. The rest room shelving.
The pit hood is the build we are proudest of. Sheet metal over a welded angle-iron frame — the angle iron came from a fabricator on the south side who cut and prepped the pieces to spec, the welding and the hanging was us. Roughly 30 hours of shop time across two weekends. The hood pulls draft from a 6-inch line into the existing stack and steps down to a 4-inch return at the back wall. It looks intentional. It is also, honestly, the build that scared us the most going in — the difference between a hood that draws right and a hood that smokes out the dining room is a quarter-inch of geometry.
The host stand was salvage. A walnut slab that came out of a Manitou Springs barn that was getting torn down in May; we paid the demo crew $200 for the slab and a pair of legs from the same barn’s loft ladder. Sanded it, sealed it with hard wax oil, drilled the cable run for the POS. Total cost under $400. It still has the original chain-link from the barn loft bolted to the side as a coat hook. The kind of touch we could not have bought.
The rest room shelving was also us — pine cleats, painted-black 1x10 shelves, a single 24-inch run over the toilet for paper stock and the lockbox. Forty minutes of work. We mention it because every build-out has a list of forty-minute jobs that get quietly absorbed by whoever swings a hammer last, and if you do not name them the labor budget starts looking suspiciously trim. We swung the hammer.
Electrical, gas, hood permit, ADA bathroom.
Four lines we did not touch. The first was electrical. A 200-amp service upgrade with a dedicated 60-amp run to the hood and dedicated 30-amp runs to the cold line, the slicer, and the bar cooler. Our electrician pulled permit on a Monday, ran the rough on a Tuesday, passed inspection on a Wednesday. We have not had a breaker trip in two years of service. That is what you get for hiring the boring expensive guy.
The second was the gas line. New three-quarter-inch line from the meter to the fryer cabinet and the grill, with a regulator drop at the kitchen wall and a city-approved emergency shut-off inside the rest room corridor where the line of sight from the line cook station catches it. Pulled by a licensed plumber. Inspected the day after install. We are not the people who DIY a gas line. We are not even the people who watch someone DIY a gas line.
The third was the hood ventilation permit. The hood itself was our build (see §04). The permit, the CFM math, the make-up air calculation, the fire-suppression hookup — that was a HVAC engineer who specializes in restaurant pulls. He charged $4,200 for the package. Worth every dollar. The hood passed inspection on the first walk-through.
The fourth was the ADA bathroom build-out. A second rest room with the clearance, the grab bars, the door swing, the sink height, all of it spec’d and built by a contractor who builds nothing but ADA bathrooms in commercial conversions. He did this work for two weeks straight in late June. The build came in at $14,800. We did not value-engineer it. ADA is a place where the cheap version is the version that gets a complaint and a fine.
Week 5. The floor was rotted under the epoxy.
We had budgeted for an epoxy grind-and-recoat. We had not budgeted for what was underneath. The auto-shop floor had been epoxied three times across thirty years — the original 1990s coat, a re-pour around 2008, and a top-coat the previous tenant slapped on before they listed the building. Each layer had cracked and trapped moisture against the slab underneath. By the time the grinder hit week 5, what came up was wet concrete crumbling at the seam joints and a soft section near the old service pit that flexed when you walked on it.
We pulled in a concrete contractor on a Thursday. He gave us the news that afternoon — the slab in the dining-room footprint was salvageable with a self-leveling overlay, but a 380-square-foot section under what was going to be the kitchen line needed a full tear-out and a fresh pour. The number he quoted, including saw-cut, haul-off, vapor barrier, fresh 4-inch slab with rebar, and a 5-day cure window: $18,200. Unbudgeted. We had carried a $9,000 contingency on a $185,000 build. The contingency was already half spent on the hood permit overage.
We took the call to a credit line and signed. There was no version of this build that worked with a kitchen line on a soft slab. Five days of cure cost us our drywall week — we slid the schedule right and lost the buffer we had been holding for FF&E. The August soft-launch held because we compressed the inspection week, not because we caught up. The honest version of this story is that the floor pour ate the entire margin in the build and we opened with a thinner bank account than the spreadsheet had said we would.
We tell this story now because we would rather a future operator reading it — especially anyone eyeing a commercial conversion of a building with three decades of trade history under the slab — know to carry a real contingency. Ten percent does not do it. Fifteen is the floor. The unknown unknowns under an old slab are real, and they show up at week 5, not week 1.
Aug 2 mug club. Aug 9 the public.
Soft-launch was Friday August 2, 2024 — mug-club only, 84 covers between 5 and 9 PM, no public announcement. The mug club got an email Wednesday with the address and the window. We ran brisket, pulled pork, three sides, three sauces on the side, and a single dessert (peach cobbler, my mother-in-law’s recipe). The line ran 22 minutes from order to plate at peak. The hood behaved. The slab held. Nobody got food poisoning. We poured beers until ten and went home and slept.
We did two more soft nights — Wednesday and Thursday of the following week — to stress the kitchen at lower volume before the public hit. Both nights ran clean. We caught a couple of ticket-routing bugs and a sound issue with the bar speaker that we patched on Friday morning.
Hard launch was Friday August 9, 2024. We posted on Instagram at 7 AM and put a sandwich board out at the curb. The line was around the building by 5 PM. We sold out of brisket at 7:30 and pulled pork at 8:15. The dining room turned three times. The parking lot was full from open to close with the overflow parked at the Mash Mechanix taproom across the parking lot, which is exactly the arrangement we had hoped for and exactly what made the two-flagship math work. The honest version of opening night is that we under-ordered protein by about 35% and the team that pulled the rush together on the fly did not quit on us, which is the only metric that mattered.
We under-spec’d the dish station.
The honest weakness of the 2024 build is the dish station. We installed one three-compartment sink and a single under-counter dish machine on the back wall. The math we ran assumed 180 covers a service. We have been doing 240 to 280 on the Friday and Saturday peaks since fall 2024. The dish station is the choke point. Bus tubs stack. The dishwasher runs past close most weekends. We have lost two good dish hands to burnout that we should have prevented with another sink.
We are already planning a second three-compartment sink and a pre-rinse extension for the 2026 capital cycle, plus moving the dish machine to a hot-line wall location that breaks the current all-traffic-into-one-corner pattern. We will write it up when we install. The lesson we should have learned at design time: spec your dish station for the volume you think you will hit at year two, not the volume you opened with. We did the opposite. We have paid for it in dish-hand turnover.
That said — and we mean this without spin — the build held. The hood draws. The slab has not cracked. The ADA bathroom passes every annual. The host stand still looks like the room was built around it because in a small honest way it was. The Cantina you walk into today (see /locations/the-cantina and the lived-in walk-through at inside the Cantina) is the room those nine weeks built, with the dish station we wish we had spent another $14k on at the time. The full arc that this build sits inside lives at from trailer to flagship and our story. This is the origin moment of the flagship in that arc.
The full arc this build-out sits inside — one trailer, one slot, one flagship.
VisitThe room those nine weeks built — hours, address, parking, and how to find us.
FamilyThe longer family arc the build belongs to — the pieces before and after the Cantina.
Walk-throughThe lived-in tour of the room two years after the soft-launch night.
Come visit, or read the arc.
The room those nine weeks built is at /locations/the-cantina. The longer family arc the build belongs to is at /story.