The Woodmans Rebuild!

Now, we finally have a working website (Thank You Steve!!) , we can report on the all the going-on's within the Woodmans Arms. Since last year, I have wanted to show the story of our bar rebuild so here we are!

Without boring you all to much, ill quickly run through how we noticed something was going on with the pub.

During covid, the pub obviously wasn't in use by customers, but myself and my brother Ronnie continued to turn up to work on matters within the pub we couldn't do when we were open. For example, the extension of our car park which we done with the help of local Lee lemon who owns a very respectable plant hire business and if there was an Olympic metal for digger driving precision then he would win! We also had the new build of our new smoking shelter which I build with help from skilled local Nat Purcell. There were several other things we got on with but the key thing here is know, we were there Monday - Friday from 9:00 - 4:00pm working on the pub for when we were finally allowed to reopen. When you are there all the time, believe it or not, you tend to miss things that "gradually happen" and that's what happened with the job in hand. It was only when our mother Wendy popped in and noticed in the office a giant crack down the wall which she was adamant was not there before we shut. This started it all. From this we found several problems with the pub. In the midst of all of this, we had paid several contractors to come out and do assessments on the building for when we go "free of tie" (which still hasn't happened!!) We did this so we could know the state of the building and lucky we did, otherwise we would of signed the free of tie blind then had to pay out thousands and thousands to get this job done, basically a 1 way ticket to bankruptcy.

From this point, we had several contractors of our own, from the brewery and from the insurance come out and assess what was happening and who was responsible for it. Turned out, the timbers underneath the building were all rotten from a flooding that had happened 15 years prior and the building itself was on caulk footings which was causing some movement which meant responsibility laid with the brewery . As we waiting for the job to be confirmed it became apparent there was a serious problem with the staff struggling to walk behind the bar as it dipped in places and the snug turned into a wooden floor trampoline.

skip forward to January 2024 (2 and a half years later after finding the problem) We found ourselves closed for 2 months while the brewery maintenance team "hi-tech" closed down the site, ripped everything out until literally there was nothing left. With the bar being Ash wood, we wanted to keep this, so it was carefully removed and then put in the restaurant while work commenced within the pub. I wont go into every detail and how it was all put back in as I'm not a builder, but as you can see from the pictures the extent of the project was quite big!

In a nutshell

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The bar, back bar, the bar floor, a the snug floor were all ripped out. It was filled back in with type 1 shingle, then sand, then a DPC, then Rebar... ready for a few tones of concrete to be pumped in. Once the concrete was pumped in, the rebuild of the bar and floors could happen, then on to the decorating resulting in around 2 months of hard graft to get it ready to open.

Please take a look at the pictures, and videos. I do have more! But these give you a good idea of the work that entailed.

Thank you to our brewery Stonegate, their property manager Michael Parish, our lovely Business Development Manager Liz Appleton, Dean and Stuart head of the job planning from Hi-tech and the foreman Matt, concrete extraordinaire Geoff and the rest of the hi-tech crew who worked hard on getting us open in march.

For those you are interested more! Hi-tech have contacted us, and gave me a link to a youtube video of the job they undertook. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD4SQRnoG54  - www.hitechproperties.co.uk/case-studies/rescuing-the-woodmans-arms                                        

Snug area and bar before the re-build.

Front and back bar before the re-build.

Front and back bar before the re-build.

Front bar out, Back bar looking rather sad!

Front and back bar out! (you can see the black mark on the way where there used to be one side of the open fire once was.

Bar floor up, you can see white drainage pipes which had to be placed in a protective box ready for the concrete pour.

snug once the floor has been taken up (can see in the middle where the fire place used to be)

Laser showing how much out of plume the snug area was to the toilets, hence why the slope was put in.

Video of how the floor was built up before the concrete pour.

timber frame for the slope, once the shingle and sand was put down for the dpc to be laid on top

Video of the completed DPC and Rebar placement before the concrete was poured.

Rebar installed with the DPC, start of the concrete pour, you can see the hose which is connected to a Richard Carter truck outside.

Just finishing up the concrete pumping, overseen by Geoff the concrete expert, smoothing it all over!

The finished product, a year later!