Quiet night in the bar

Just to prove that the wireless network works in the bar, here’s a totally contrived picture of me blogging there.

Chill baby

The new cellar cooler is running and already the cellar is down from 17C to 15C. That’s a big improvement and is probably due to better insulation than the second fan unit. Both are cooling the air to 12C and dripping water enthusiastically all over the place as air conditioners tend to do.

What else today? Well, not a lot - there were no guests last night and none as yet tonight. There are a few bookings for the weekend but in general it’s been a wretchedly slow season here and everywhere else.

Some Belgian bikers did turn up and ordered eight pints of real ale which flustered our barmaid slightly as we serve it from the cellar and usually sell no more than four or five pints in a day. Suddenly being asked for eight at once while welcome causes a fair amount of people scampering around clutching large numbers of pint glasses.

Work continues - Some plywood sheeting was fitted to the new kitchen floor today and some skirting and door facings were attached. D*** is coming up in a couple of weeks to see progress.

For the upgrading of the unused rooms we are seriously considering carrying out some of the joinery, plasterboarding and decoration work ourselves. We’re fairly sure that we could do it to a better standard than the current workers and have a vested interest in finishing on time and to budget. D**** is not completely negative about this but has highlighted the fact that, particulary with Room 1 the work is quite complicated and may be too difficult for us to do ourselves.

Insult meets injury

It seems to be “Injure John” week. Part of it’s due to the cellar cooler which is nearing completion. That’s MkII of course MKI having rotted to powder within eight weeks. So, while disassembling MKI I managed to knock a lump out of my finger on the edge of the laminate board. Then I picked up various other cuts and bruises while assembling MKII. MKII is now finished, filled with water and waiting for electrical wiring before the grand switch on.

Here it is in all its glory. The pipework and pump are now mounted vertically on laminate board and better insulated to avoid the condensation problem. You can see one of the little fan heater units at the right of the picture.

Tonight, to avoid any further injury, we went out for dinner . We went to Burt’s Hotel in Melrose , parked just across the street and I somehow contrived to shut the car door without moving my left foot out of the way first. Owowowowoow!

Dinner was OK though rather heavy on dead animals and not much in the way of accompaniment. £Lots for three courses plus a half bottle of wine.

And it might have to serve as an early birthday present for me since one of our bar staff is signed off for ten days with stress - whether hers or ours is not clear. We interviewed for new staff today so the problem may be temporary. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

Wireless sort-of-work

I’m writing this in the publc bar - Yay! Wireless networking works.

Well, not quite.

I’m writing this in the one very small part of the bar where I can get a connection - beside the door to the kitchen which is where the wireless router is sitting.
Everywhere else, there is a four foot thick sandstone wall in the way and that means there’s no connection. Still, it’s progress of a sort.

We were full last night, in fact if we’d had three times as many rooms we’d still have been full. Tonight at 8.30 we were empty.
Then a couple turned up followed by four Italians (without huge suitcases for once).

The workmen are back tomorrow. Oh joy!

…and so to bed

Wireless Not-work

Blogger seems to be on a go-slow tonight. It took ages to load. Coincidentally I’ve spent most of the day raging against the machine. Well, one machine in particular - my laptop. Now, it’s not a Dell, so it doesn’t catch fire, but it does seem to have extreme difficulty in remembering just where it put its wireless connection (It’s about here somewhere - I’m sure I saw it just a moment ago - Oh never mind I’ll just tell him I can’t find the website he’s looking for)

Let me explain. We don’t use the evil one’s operating system because it is expensive, doesn’t work very well and gets every virus going. Instead up until now we have used this version of the Linux operating system. It used to be called Mandrake and was one of the better commercial distributions of Linux. Then they tied up with a company called Connectiva, changed the name to Mandriva and frankly bits that used to work don’t any more. And the bits that used not to work still don’t. Most glaringly, file sharing doesn’t work at all. That’s kind of fundamental when you are trying to share files.

So I looked around and came across SuSE which used to be a German distribution, but was bought by Novell, a big US networking company. It got rave reviews from some people (others said it sucked) but I went ahead and bought it.

And most of it is a big improvement. It installs itself pretty painlessly, detects all the bits of the computer correctly and sets them up fairly well. But this wireless network has caused no end of grief. It’s working now, but due to 6 foot stone walls it loses the signal occasionally.

And when that happens it doesn’t bother to try to find it again. It just sits and sulks. You have to issue arcane commands in a terminal window to get it going again. Most annoying.

Continuing the technology theme, Lorna dropped one of our two way radios into a bucket of hot soapy water while cleaning one of the bathrooms. The radio has been strangely quiet ever since.

The mad inventor strikes again

The cellar cooling device is undergoing a rebuild. The original had some drawbacks principally that it dripped condensation everywhere and, being built largely of mdf, turned blue and hairy and fell to pieces in no time. The new version has the pump assembly mounted vertically on laminate board (left over from the kitchen) and lots of pipe insulation which the Scottish & Newcastle tech services man left me. Progress has been good, but it will be a day or two until it’s finished.

Mixed news on the staff front. Our job advertisement yielded four replies. One has found a job already, one is coming for interview and the other two didn’t put a contact phone number on their application form. Giving someone the job because she’s the only applicant is a bad idea.

The public bar was very quiet today. It would have been busier if we’d been serving meals since most of the folk who came in were looking for lunch/dinner. At the moment we seem to be acting as a redirection service for other restaurants!

Niche market

I don’t know what this mausoleum is called, but it’s clearly visible on the A68 just before Lilliards Edge. I was in Galashiels and Melrose today. Got some stuff at the cash and carry and two half barrels at an “antique” shop in Melrose. They’ll be used for plants in the beer garden.

Meanwhile, stripping is taking place in the function room. The decorator appears to be camera shy and objected to his left arm appearing in the picture hence the modifications!

That frieze is made of paper mache and comes off in very small pieces. Much muffled swearing from the decorators. Although fairly old it is not in keeping with the rest of the room and bits of it were missing. It made sense to take the rest off and have a plain frieze.

In the new kitchen, panelling continues:

but it’s in the old lounge bar that interesting things have been discovered.

Here’s the area where the bar was. Nice wallpaper isn’t it(!?). But take a look at the middle of the picture where behind the wall we found a very ornate niche.

Here’s a closer view. Was it a door? Was it put in when the lounge bar was created in the 1940s? Who knows?

Lies, damn lies and completion dates

I don’t know why I even bother to write “so and so work will be finished on such and such a day” because I know it won’t happen and you know it won’t happen. The temporary partition is still there although the reasons for its continued existence are good - they don’t want to remove it until the new cornices are fitted because that’s likely to generate some dust. The person who’ll be doing cornice work was here today, hauled off a length of cornice to take a mould from and will be back, hopefully this week.

Meanwhile in the old kitchen the ventilation system is nearly complete. The installer had forgotten to write down the length of steel required, had cut it to size from memory and, well, you guess the rest! He’ll be back sometime this week with a correctly measured piece. There’s a new ceiling in the kitchen corridor, work is being done on the walls - no nasty surprises there thankfully - and the old central heating pipe was cut out with an angle grinder which made the most revolting smell of burning metal and burning wood.

I have switched off the cellar cooler and will start on a redesign tomorrow. There are two problems - condensation and lack of cooling power. I have salvaged some offcuts of the laminated wallboard from the kitchen and will add lots of pipe insulation and rockwool to try to prevent the condensation problem and I will add a second fan convector to double the size of the heat exchanger. If I could find the third one I’d add it too - it’s somewhere about….

No pics today - none of today’s progress is particularly photogenic.

Getting plastered

The Jedburgh Co-op is doing a really nice Jacaranda Rose. There’s a Shiraz and a white as well. Three bottles for a tenner. Yum!

Actually the title of this post was meant to relate to the fact that the plasterers showed up yesterday and made good progress.
We’re on course to get the temporary partition removed next week and we’re reaching the stage where we can see light at the end of the tunnel which for once isn’t the headlamp of the oncoming train.

The bar is very quiet tonight. Apparently the Cross Keys in Ancrum are celebrating their 100th birthday and there are barbecues and bands and whatever. On the B&B side we’re busy: we have ten guests eight of whom have turned up since lunchtime.

Order of work

The ventilation engineers were back today and probably wished that they had spent the morning fitting the external fan unit and the afternoon doing the internal work. That’s because the morning was dry and the afternoon… wasn’t. They claim they’ll be back on Monday to finish off.

Meanwhile the plasterers didn’t show today, but the plasterboarding is complete in the function room and residents’ lounge. If the plasterers come tomorrow then the temporary partition at the foot of the stairs can be removed.

We have three Aussies, two English and three workmen (painters working on the new Tesco in Galashiels) staying tonight.