When I was a kid, someone fairly wise told me that one of the key ingredients to a happy marriage is to marry a woman whose Dad owned a pub. As an 8 year old boy, that advice didn’t mean much to me and I largely forgot it, until around the time I was asking Laura to marry me. She ticked every box I was looking for in a wife, 100% perfect in every way, except, her Dad didn’t own a pub. He did (and still does) own enough junk to fill one of those weird British pubs with bikes on the wall and flying ducks, but not an actual pub.
I don’t want Harriet’s future husband to have the same issue. If Harriet turns out anything like her mother, or grandmother, or even great grandmother, her husband is going to regularly need a drink or two.
With that in mind and Bitcoin prices through the roof, I decided that I was going to build a pub in my back yard and I wasn’t going to half ass it. As with any virtuous endeavor, particularly one I am involved in, it hasn’t gone fully to plan.
Regular readers of this irregular ramblings will remember we had an over ground pool in our back yard. Well we don’t anymore. It has been removed to clear out as much space as possible on our 640 sqft covered patio. That was the only part that went without a hitch…
My ultimate goal was to create a pub similar to one of those ones in Tenerife, where you can gamble on the horses, while the football is on in the background and have a game of pool. If you’ve never seen one before they are awesome. Combining literally three of my favorite things, alcohol, total guesswork gambling and pub sports.
Firstly we needed lighting. Nobody wants to drink beer in the dark do they? So I went to Home Depot and bought 60 feet of string lighting. Proper lightbulbs, that I thought I could attach to the roof and the side pillars to create a seductive ambience akin to that of an upmarket restaurant or high class tiki bar. Well the first thing you should know about this endeavor and me as a person is I am not “Handy”. My life goals have never revolved around being able to build stuff. My life goals as it relates to that, have largely been to earn enough money so I can pay a professional person to do it for me. I have failed in that, so I had a go.
One of the problems of not ever doing any DIY or building anything is that I don’t really know where to start anything. I rushed back with these fancy lights and literally no idea of how to put them up. Almost nothing I try works first time, in fact it rarely works second time, but it seemed like I had got this right, I was buzzing. In my head I was like one of Laura’s other guilty crushes Nick Knowles off of DIY SOS, fixing stuff, great singing voice, devastatingly handsome, in reality my over confidence was just slightly misplaced.
5 minutes after I had them up and sat down the world was a better place. 6 minutes after I had them up and sat down, the world was a darker, noisier place, littered with broken glass and mistakes. I felt like I was back in Canvey Island. The lights had fallen down and shattered everywhere. Fortunately there were only two people sitting out there, unfortunately one of them was Laura. I learned a couple of things in that moment. Firstly duct tape wrapped around metal poles won’t hold 32 light bulbs for long, secondly the sound of broken glass is a brief moment of heaven, compared to 15 minutes of Laura calling me dickhead for thinking that the first thing I learned could possibly not be the case.
Ultimately I did found a solution, but it cost me. Not just in monetary terms, but also in terms of my first bollocking of this project.
Lighting sorted it was time to move on. What sort of pub doesn’t have a TV? An outdoor TV ranks incredibly highly on my “Working class kid’s done well” scale, a scale that is basically the total number of inches of TV you own, divided by the number of rooms in your house.
I had a new TV, so the old one was going outside, I also had a bracket to hang it. $0 spent, just a bit of drilling and the jobs a good un.
Florida homes are made of breeze block on the bottom tier, which I would have to drill into, but one in three of those are filled with poured concrete. Which one do you think I drilled into? My battery powered drill was not cutting it.
Borrowed hammer drill in hand I spent 90 minutes trying to drill 4 holes into the side of my house. I have 100% got RSI from doing this. Finished it all, hung the 55 inch TV plugged it all in, sat back down and turned it on. Everything worked just fine, if you can ignore the 35 degree angle the TV sits at.
I sent a picture of the TV to a friend of mine, showing off that slowly I was becoming a sort of English Handy Manny, (as I wrote this I realized that Bob the Builder has already cornered that market pretty successfully, but you get the drift). Smugly sat, with my lights secure and TV on, my phone buzzed. It was a reply to my message, telling me it wasn’t hung straight.
No time to worry about minor things like that, the next step was to buy a fridge. Didn’t need a fridge, no need for it whatsoever. Purely there for show. The only thing that served literally no purpose was the only thing that I sorted without a problem. It’s sitting out there now, two months later full of Alcoholic Seltzers nobody has touched or will touch as long as I’ve got a hole in my arse
The actual bar was next. I ordered this from a company in Philidelphia on December 2nd 2020. As I sit here it is February 25th. I don’t have a bar. Apparently I am getting it in two weeks, but as far as I know the good people at http://www.homebarkits,com have stolen my money. I chased it today, the guy told me it had snowed in Philidelphia last week and that put him behind. I ordered it 13 fucking weeks ago. It hasn’t snowed for 13 fucking weeks.
Main focal point ordered and now time for the fun part. A draft beer system. This is in essence another fridge, with Carbon Dioxide on the back and a beer tap on top. You buy kegs of beer, put it in the fridge part and pour away your favorite pint. This is called a kegorator. It arrived a week late and set about setting it up.
Now whilst I am not good at building stuff, I am good at putting stuff other people build together. Usual man method, throw the instructions away, I’ll work it out. It took me two days and 124 miles of driving to get to the point where I could even attempt to pour a pint and when I did it was fucking undrinkable. It was like Jordan’s Only Fans account, 95% head.
It took about 13 pints of wasted Miller Light before I could stop throwing the froth all over the garden and get a proper pint.
It’s all starting to slowly take shape now. Draft beer, fridge, lighting, I am even offering food with a high quality griddle, serving pancakes, omelettes, burgers, a full range of high quality products.
Then came the pool table……
What sort of pub doesn’t have a pool table? It’s absolutely necessary, in my entire adult life in the UK I have never visited a pub that didn’t have a pool table and I am not about to start now. I didn’t want a shit one though, I’ve got some standards, I wanted a proper slate bed, level table. One that could showcase my unique pool talents.
We had a couple of near misses when trying to buy a table. The main one being when we got let down by a chiropractor. He text us as we pulled up to his house telling us he had just sold it. Fake doctor prick, a fact I may or may not have made sure he knew.
Miraculously though a friend of ours was selling theirs, so like an agile jaguar stalking it’s prey in the wild I pounced. Arranged for a company to pick it up and we were good to go.
Laura was home the day the table arrived, I was at work, but like all good businesses the company turned up 30 minutes early. A fact that was brought to my attention by the text message from Laura telling me I needed to tell them to “Fuck off for half an hour because she was putting the hoover round” This was the first of several texts and sweary phone calls over the next hour.
Unfortunately the table had some water damage on two of the legs. By “some water damage” I mean that half of the back two legs had welded themselves to our friends patio, I received a photo proving this and my heart sunk. Not initially because I wouldn’t be seven balling Fred that evening, but because the previous day I may have said to Laura that she couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery and now I was at work while 2 people with more limbs than teeth were in my house telling her that this had been poorly organized.
These two fellas just fucked off and left 800lbs of slate and wood in my garage, saying they would come back when I sorted it. I mean shit they work in the pool table industry, surely they know someone, but no, just fuck off with $200 and no help at all.
This left me with the difficult task of obtaining two pool table legs. On a scale of 1-10 on difficulty, finding two pool table legs is about an 11. Who sells individual pool table legs, especially the exact same ones that I needed? I tried to contact the company that built the table, they went out of business midway through the French revolution. I called cabinet makers, they wanted $350 a leg, I tried to bury my head in the sand, but Laura is a strong project manager and wouldn’t allow that. Well actually she just didn’t want all the shit in the garage, which is ironic really, because the spare room that was my office is so full of shit Laura is selling in her new business venture its like Amazon have opened their latest distribution center in my house.
Eventually I secured 4 legs from a company in Tennessee, just the two weeks delivery.
Anyway longgggg tedious story involving me getting shouted at, a new cloth on the table and Laura varnishing a ton of wood, the pool table is finally up.
That all being said, Jeff, if you are reading this, I have had your money in an envelope in my kitchen for 5 weeks now, I will drop it round! I was expecting Laura to, but as she regularly tells me she is the organ grinder I am the monkey.
So where does that leave us. I have everything in place now except for the bar. I have personalized glasses for regulars, beer mats, darts, even astroturf to keep everyone in top levels of comfort. I may have two wonderful children, a fantastic wife, a home, currently three cars, achieved everything I could ever have hoped for, but the day I finish this pub will be my life’s crowning achievement.
I even set up “The Lock Inn” on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Lock-Inn/105830004822973 Please rate and review!) I am taking this VERY seriously. The only problem is that it is now easier for me to get a pint than a glass of water. Every keg of beer holds about 80 pints, Since Christmas I have gone through 4 kegs. I have put on 15lbs and I have had a hangover for the entire of 2021.
It is far, far from finished, I don’t actually think it ever will be to be honest, but some time soon I will be hosting an official opening and sometime not very long after that I will be writing another blog moaning about a load of freeloaders drinking all my beer!
The Shroders in Florida 