My wife and I bought this old wooden walk in cooler from a shop that closed in the mid 80’s around the corner from our new shop we built out this past year. It took my brother and I as well as a few big bodies 2 days to disassemble this beauty. It’s mostly oak with Douglas fir framing. Each one of these panels weighs a ton, we had to resort to some creative techniques to get this thing down without killings ourselves in the process. I have seen a number of these around old shops and buildings in Buffalo. I can’t imagine the crew that used to put these things up on a daily basis.
We plan to put this up in the “bar” area of our building. We bought our building in July of 2019 to create a new shop that was built to our needs and aesthetic. The retail butcher side was a complete new build in a part of the structure that was used for a prep room by the previous owners. The walk in cooler will go up in what was a bar and dining area. We want it to be the centerpiece of the room and store dry age meats. We will have to retro fit the interior to dry age specs otherwise we want to highlight the old patina of this beauty. We hope for it to be a 6-9 month project based on finances and because we have to build it where our current customer bathroom is. Thus, we have to build a new bathroom and do some electrical and plumbing reconfiguration.
Above is the pic of the cooler before we took it down. I’ll send some more pics of where it going to go in the next few days.
Check us out on Instagram at Moriarty Meats!
Also, if anyone has any tips for installing this beast let me know.
Thanks,
Tom