[Superchunk]

I'll try to lay out where I'm at and what I'm thinking as best I can, and I'm hoping for general or specific advice from anyone.

I'm in the process of turning a highschool home-ec room (two stoves, two sinks, two fridges, and a hood...some various utensils and pots and pans) into a reasonable commercial kitchen. The end goal is to have a program that is profitable through catering and to a lesser degree by serving the staff lunch.

We have no gas now, and from the looks of my meagre budget, gas is likely out of the question. This is dissapointing to me but I figure not the end of the world.

I have a decent commercial grade 6 burner range with oven that was donated - I'm told it will cost $2500 to wire it in, but it's there.

So, here is basically what I'm thinking of buying:
- Reach in fridge - big as I can get within a reasonable price range. I can still work in the regular fridges I have as backups for now
- 3 sink dishwashing unit. I think I will skip buying a dishwasher - the one thing I have is employees (students) and they might as well get fast in a dishpit
- heat lamp (for staff lunches)
- Chaffing dishes x 3 (?)
- tabletop steam tables (I think this might be helpful for both the 'restaurant' side and the catering side)
- Hopefully some equipment racks, work tables, hotel pans etc...
- Another good chunk of money will have to go towards installation of these things - plumbing and electrical

Is there anything significant I'm missing so far? Things that will make life easier for either catering or small scale 'restauranting'?

What kind of costs do you think I'm looking at for installation - grease traps, that sort of thing?

Am I best trying to buy used to save on money? I feel like there is likely plenty of used restaurant equipment floating around out there.

What do I need to make sure I have for catering? I'm sure there are plenty of things I'm not thinking of on that front, having limited experience doing catering.

Please hit me with any thoughts, ideas or advice on equipment - all of this setup only comprises about 10% of my job or my daily allotment of mind power despite it's importance being, obviously, very high (or the program pretty much fails).

Thanks to anyone who can help a brother out in any way

[foodpump]

The first, very first thing you have to do is look at how you want to ventilate---that is, remove the cooking odours and gas fumes. Budget a lot of money for this, and really shop around when finding a mech. engineer to submit the drawings to City hall/municipality. Budget around $3-$5 big ones for a fire suppression system too.

Equipment is the easy part.....