WE’RE MAKING PROGRESS

In this series of blog post from Ellie of The Grapes, you can follow their journey as they transform the pub over the coming months. In this blog she talks about the progress of the transformation of the pub!

I can’t believe we’ve been in here more than a month already!

If you were to look at the place then and now you probably wouldn’t notice a great deal of difference but in the last four weeks a further three to four tonnes of rubble and dirt have been removed, all the paper stripped from the walls and a lot of cleaning, stripping and tapping of hammers has taken place.

Nearly every day is a fourteen-hour day and then, as we live off grid its back home to light fires before we can cook and go to sleep to do it all over again……but WE LOVE IT!

We love the building and it’s a real joy working together. One of our drinks suppliers came in the other day and was slightly perplexed that we didn’t have a team of builders on sight sorting everything out.

Aside from the fact we don’t have the budget for that kind of luxury, John explained that there are (hopefully) going to be a lot of people coming through our doors over the coming years and things are going to go wrong. If we know where absolutely everything is, then we can fix it fast and we don’t need to make any costly mistakes.

There are professionals on the way though, don’t panic. We’re not complete dreamers. There’s the electricians and plumbers who are dealing with the upper floors on behalf of the owners, who are also doing work down here.  The pipework is a joy to behold and we have a super-efficient heating and hot water system going in.

There’s the floor fitters and plasterers, though the latter can’t make a start until the floorboards in the living room above have been nailed down otherwise everything will drop straight off again.  The whole building has been fire proofed and some of the lovely elm boards in the upstairs room have had to be replaced which is quite a lengthy procedure in a listed building, so we wait.

John has lined out the kitchen with stainless steel sheets from the lovely folks down the road at Avery Knight and Bowlers and having hoovered the front porch a couple of weeks ago, only to have to remove the floorboards and the joists below as I could have put my hand through them, he is now starting to put it all back together including a door threshold to keep the rain that has probably been pouring into the building for decades, out.

Rotten floorboards that aren’t safe enough for people to walk on have been replaced but they are good enough to rip down and turn into tables we are planning for the front of the bar, so in essence the same wood will be just a couple of feet above where it was before.

The bar is all planned out and we start work on creating a new beer cellar next week…..it’s all very exciting.  I just wish I had sprained my ankle the other day so I could help some more.  But then I wouldn’t have had time to write this website would I.

This was written by Ellie from The Grapes Bath, to view more of her blogs please click here.