One Year Ago!

Moving in……

This week marks one year since we took over this abandoned ex pet shop unit in the Ryemarket, complete with lots of their remnants and a lot of mess! Much of it we managed to give away on Freecycle such the freezers, some scrap to the tat man, dozens of old pet shop boxes for Sally at Mary Stevens Hospice Recycling and you’ll recognise some of the furniture that we upcycled! The rest went into a skip!

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Then long days & weeks spent scraping the walls (and knuckles) with that awful woodchip paper with some help from the younger Maniax lads as it was half term, helped by bribes of chocolate & sweets, while Mr Maniax (AKA Dean) spent the weekends helping his carpenter mate John Fitz, build the partition across half the shop.

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A LOT of painting went on….I did the furniture and then walls were painted by another tradesman friend Dave….

More painting and I papered the partition wall…….

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Shelf building and sign writing ……..

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So after a month of hard graft and late nights 7 days a week, we were finally ready to go at the beginning of December. This week marks the anniversary of the start of the work but I’ll share the rest of our journey from opening and why it began another time!