How Novi man’s kitchen renovation allows for guests despite COVID-19

Some families settle for holidays over Zoom. However, this didn’t cut it for one Novi man, so he took matters into his own hands and built a COVID-19-free cafe in his home.

Carl Rickel, 63, built a 5-by-8 foot airtight room, encased in plexiglass and held together with plywood and gaskets. The “COVID-free” cafe, as the family calls it, sections off a part of the kitchen and connects to the outside sliding door, letting the air inside the makeshift cafe circulate separately from the house’s air.

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The room essentially quarantines visitors and gives them their own space and supply of air. Rickel also built another small chamber on the side of the cafe that allows him to give visitors food and drinks without any contact. He said it operates much like an airlock.

“We thought this is going be long term, the COVID pandemic,” Yvette Rickel, 61 and Carl’s wife, said. “We couldn’t imagine going month after month after month of just not sharing a meal together, and we love to share.”

The Rickel’s children are front line workers who’ve been battling the pandemic since the start. Their daughter, Monique Rickel, is a nurse at U-M Hospital and makes rounds in the COVID-19 ward. Her fiance, Michael Vallespir, is also a nurse at Ascension Providence Hospital in Novi, and he works with COVID-19 patients as well.

After months of isolation, the room allows the Rickels to spend some time with their friends and children, enjoying old activities and conversations that everyone took for granted pre-pandemic. Carl even installed a microphone, usually seen in a bank-telling window, in the plexiglass room.

“I went and bought plywood from Home Depot and cut it to fit while it was still warm out. I bought plexiglass, which was getting hard to get because everyone was putting up plexiglass in their businesses,” he said. “After that, I screwed, glued and taped everything together and attached it to the wall, the ceiling, and the sliding panels, so it would fit perfectly with the gasketing to use for the air conditioners.”

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Rickel took five days to complete this project, he said. Yvette said Carl is a “do-it-yourself kind of guy.” However, it helps that Carl has an engineering background.

Rickel graduated from Lawrence Technological University. He worked many years as a software manager for a company that built instrument clusters for General Motors, and he retired two years ago.

Rickel said he wishes he could make this contraption for nursing homes, but the project would be too costly and unsustainable for a facility with a large number of residents.

When Yevette and Carl unveiled the COVID-19-free cafe to his family, they said everyone was so happy.

Their nurse daughter and son-in-law have to wear uncomfortable respirators and heavy-duty masks for their whole shifts. This room allows them to eat, talk and breathe comfortably without the lingering fear of spreading the coronavirus to their parents.

The cafe lets the family be together, and although separated by plexiglass, allows them to feel somewhat normal amid this peculiar time.