Before you start deciding which beer to try first 😉 A little more about James, Ben and I. We’re trying something new here in France. With a background in hospitality and marketing, oh and beer (tasting, drinking & brewing!) 🍻, we decided to live life differently. We planned for 5 years, romanticised about different businesses, had many discussions (arguments) 😉 searching across France, until we found this little gem. But, it hasn’t always looked like this! A few days after moving in, we started the demolition. We’ve built a bar, a brewery & rooms.
How quickly a year passes by, this is our renovation story, our journey so far – as we took on the role as guardians to this gorgeous property 🔨 😓 🧱
Watch the story unfold on @channel4 … Our New Life In The Sun 📺
Our New Bar …
Very quickly the local DIY shop knew our names. The first of many, many purchases … a crowbar & sledgehammer! 😅 Never done anything like this before … but oddly quite rewarding 🔨 🧱 this early phase was simple. Strip everything out and back 😅 We started in what was the original bar, taking down the drop ceiling, old bar & basically created lots of mess 😆
Walls … going, going, gone!
The original bar was split into various rooms. We wanted to create a sense of surprise as you walk into the space. We took down a central wall to start to open up & combine spaces into what is currently our bar space. First time with a jackhammer – and – highly recommend (those that know, know!) 😉
Our Chambre D’Hote …
Underneath our bar, we have double, triple & family rooms. Mixing up our daily routine of creating mess 🧱 🔨 taking down walls & ceilings we spent much of our first few months renovating and decorating these rooms. We enjoyed this, I think through comfort in truth. Painting and wallpapering felt familiar and relatively simple versus the projects upstairs 😓
A Hidden Ceiling…
The original plan was to replace the existing ceiling … not to take them all down! 😅 However, whilst exploring every corner of our new property, including the dreaded ‘is the roof ok’, we discovered this metal A-frame running through the whole of upstairs. Truly beautiful! And then of course – we couldn’t take it out of our minds to strip all the ceilings down and make this a feature in the main bar area.
Our plan was to create half the space with a new flat plastered ceiling and the other main bar space with this huge floor to ceiling reveal. We removed 26 tonnes of materials out … five various ceilings, so many ceiling tiles, together with the original wooden joists 🔨
Huge amount of extra work, but actually welcomed it as it was freezing through Jan & Feb! DIY is like free central heating 😆
The Brewery …
👋 Brewing…hands up, we were quite precious with the brewkit. After lots of research, painstakingly visiting as many microbreweries as possible … tough right! 😉 We purchased our brewery from Vancouver Island, Canada 🇨🇦 Getting it across borders, across rail, sea & road was tricky. Learning as we went, we appointed some help with port transport & French border control. Truly felt out of our depth, genuinely worrying that our tanks would get stuck – but what we’ve now safely got is a flexible set of unitanks. It means we can mash, boil, ferment & store in single tanks … never held up from fermentation capacity. The real fun started when the crates arrived! All beautifully packed up, but, without wheels, 100’s of parts & packed upside down! We had to get so many extra hands to take this challenge on. After the headaches of getting the tanks into France … we didn’t realise the real challenge would start once we crowbarred them open! New water, new drainage, waterproofing the floor, we finally wheeled the tanks into their new home 🏡 Our brewery with – we think so at least – one of the most beautiful views in France 🇫🇷
That (!) door …
👋 The door…so this has featured a lot this week on New Life In The Sun. This could have been a huge showstopper for our opening … we installed on the Friday, we opened on the Tuesday! 😅
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