…..are we still allowed to say that?
We feel like we’re just about landing back to the ground after a busy Christmas Market and festive season and have been busy rustling drinks and putting on great music as ever but also, busying about underground in our cellars.
You know how it is. Life gets busy, lots of projects run on one from another and before you know it, the five cellars you have are heaving with “things’ and you don’t necessarily need all of them or maybe they just take up far less space overall once you get everything organised again. Either way, we need space because we have something very exciting coming up.
As many of you will know, Jonny and I did this place up on a pretty shoestring budget and one of the things to suffer most of all in the last five years is the bar top. By the time we got to that part of our renovation way back in 2019, money was really tight, so we decided to clad the bar in sheets of zinc we got down the road and install it ourselves.
We didn’t do such a bad job but one thing I now know is why zinc bars have rounded edges…..something that was a far cry away from our capabilities. You see zinc as it turns out is rather a thin product and over the intervening years our bar has taken an inevitable bashing from thousands of happy Grapes fans. The result is split edges and that isn’t the safest environment for our gorgeous team or you guys, so a new bar top is being fitted at the start of March.
But why stop there? Taking the bar top off is a pretty major job as it turns out. We’ll have to strip down the entire place, so we thought, while we’re at it, let’s do some other improvements that have been on the list for some time. So we’re getting some new fonts as we seemed to have cleaned the ones we’ve had since opening back to the bare metal. If we’re going to that trouble, we might as well get some new lines in, so we’ll be adding another real ale to our front bar. There are some other new products in the offing but they are a surprise too far on this occasion. You’ll have to watch our socials to find out what’s going on nearer to the time.
So what is that time? Well, all going according to plan, we shall be closing our doors early on Sunday 2nd March at around 7pm after the rather wonderful Psycho Acoustic Goat have done their amazing thing as part of our 4pm Sunday Sessions. Our fab Cellar Tech is then coming in (he also likes Psycho Acoustic Goat thankfully) to rip out all the lines and give Jonny and I a chance to get the bar top off overnight, while the team strip the rest of the place and get everything stowed away in a safe place. Then we’re all going to work like crazy and be open in time for Jazz Night on Wednesday the 5th March. Well that’s the plan anyway.
I feel exhausted just thinking about it. Now, back to that organising!
P.S Speaking of socials, in case you were wondering we have closed our Twitter accounts but you can find under the same names over on Bluesky!
PPS. Community groups and organisations using the living room space upstairs are unaffected by these closures. You’ll just have to BYO!
Eleanor @TheBathLandlady and @thegrapesbath
