We must be mad !!
Here we are opening a bar in rural Spain, where 99% of our customers are going to be Spanish and even after a year of living here, classes almost everyday, CD and computer discs our Spanish was still well below basic !
Add to that the fact the bar was little more than a shell and to get anything like we wanted was going to take a lot of hard work and we would have to rely heavily on expats who could not just speak a bit of Spain but were fluent !
I am fussy, which proves to be an issue from time to time, I am learning however you can't always have perfect and sometimes have to make do for a bit ! So with our vision for what we wanted implanted in my head we started to make headway, slowly be surely, as the Spanish say to me almost everyday 'poca y poco' 'little by little'. In an ideal world I would have loved to speak Spanish fluently and just thrown money at the bar until it was just how I wanted, but neither of these things were possible !
The bar had a peach flower border which really wasn't to my taste, luckily it came off easily and removing the matching curtains wasn't an issue either.
We decided to paint two tones of purple, mainly as that's my favour colour ! We would need to buy matching curtains as it looked so bear without curtains, outside needed to be painted too. We painted behind the bar, the skirting board tiles and the three posts that were in the centre of the bar area a dark purple, the rest of the walls a very light purple. Outside darker purple across the bottom but not as dark as behind the bar and the top the very light purple.
The outside space with this bar is amazing at the front you have a covered porch area and the back a huge terrace overlooking the swimming pool ! I have not seen an inland bar with such incredible outside space, it was and is the bars unique selling point !
The next issue was there was no store room, not a problem in the winter as the town hall kindly said we could use the swimming pools changing rooms, but what about the rest of the time ? We talked about it and an area of the bar seemed to be dead space, between the toilet doors and entrance to behind the bar. Okay, could we make that a store room ? After speaking to Mr W it was decided that some wooden batons and plaster board would do that and he also managed to find a door from somewhere, can't remember where now ! After a few days we had a new store room !
Now for the kitchen, well at this point the word kitchen is slightly ambitious ! It had a very small corner wash hand basin, dishwasher, fridge without shelves, a old industrial gas cooker, a stainless steel work bench and two old metal tables. Oh and a deep fat fryer with no basket or lid, that went straight away. The town hall kindly took the extractor fan down and away to be cleaned, I am told it took two full days of power hosing to get it clean, thank god I didn't have to do that !
Mrs W and I set about cleaning it up, but it was clear from the start that we needed a kitchen putting in, with a sink and draining board !
Mrs W and I worked tirelessly to get the walls and floor clean and that cooker ! We used everything you can imagine to get that clean, it wasn't as perfect as I would have liked it to be but we ran out of ideas when the acid didn't work !
Friends of ours had a kitchen business so we where able to get a old display model kitchen at a good price. The only problem with it was the hole for the sink was in the wrong place but we over came that with tin foil seal with marble block on top ! We now had a kitchen ! Shelves were made for the fridge, one of the metal tables was covered with sticky back plastic, several times, to make a home for the new deep fat fryer and the microwaves. The stainless steel work bench was,once cleaned, perfect it had a shelf underneath for pots and pans, which we would have to purchase.
Along with the deep fat fryer the town hall took a way a chicken spit roast machine, it was huge, I have no idea if it worked or not but the thought of cleaning it was to much for me. So they too it away !
The bar itself seemed fairly new a nice wooden surface with a crazy paving style front, that sounds awful but really it is nice !
The bar came with a large fireplace which was to prove a huge asset, a sink behind the bar and a big stainless steel fridge, which made a great work top, although when we went in the town hall had to get it fixed as it didn't work ! There was also a coffee machine again not the most reliable, but at least it saved us buying one !
The fluorescent lighting didn't really do it for me, so that was something else we would have to look into and change !
What else would we encounter before opening ?
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