Genesis - Part I, Matthew Lau
This will be the first of many entries over the coming months to try and recap how Carioca Bowls and Full Lotus PDX came into existence. They won’t necessarily go in perfect chronological order, but they’ll give you the gist of how much work, fun, and passion went into bringing this project to fruition.
So, we'll start in February when we first signed the lease. I gathered a small army of friends and new acquaintances, including a Lewis and Clark Senior named Jake. Richard knew Jake's cousin who lived in NYC, and had said he was a hard worker, needed cash, and was a 'super handy craftsman' sort of dude. Once I got Jake on board, he started gathering friends from LC who also wanted to make some ca$h, get fed La Sirineta burritos, and drink beer.
Jake is the dude on the right
On day one, I realized that Jake loved the Beastie Boys, being from Brooklyn and all, so we cranked up the music and worked late into the late. I was “on the wagon” at the time but I was happy to fuel this cool college kid with beer in exchange for some skilled craftmanship. Once he had a few in him, he had me in stitches with his Beastie Boys renditions. We spent that first night destroying a lathe and plaster closet in the yoga room that ended up being over 3,000 lbs worth of materials. To get the job done, we had sledge hammers, axes, and a saw to boot. Initially both Jake and I looked at the closet and said it should only take a couple of hours to demolish. That was before we knew it wasn’t sheet rock. Instead it was constructed in an old convoluted building style with wire mesh and super thick plaster. This simple project suddenly become an incredibly time consuming mess of tangled wires, heavy plaster, and dust (I ruined at least 3 tees).
By the time we got this closet out and had our contractors fix our mess, it was a month later. We ended up finishing this project with less than 10 minutes to spare before our inaugural yoga class in late march!
This was our first lesson about how things always take more work, time, and money than you can possibly estimate.