It was all going so well....

I have felt all along that our re-furbishment was going just TOO well..... and bang, the thunderclap came out of the sky and thumped me with a huge whack last week. We ordered fabulous new furniture from HJ Berry in Chipping late last year - good firm with a good reputation - for our re-furbished upstairs restaurant. £7k in total and £3.5 deposit paid. Fabulous - won't it look wonderful!! You're getting a taste for where this blog post is going aren't you??

Everything else is virtually in place or ordered; painting - done! Blinds for wondows - ordered and going up next week. New carpet; ordered and being fitted in a fortnight. Furniture ordered - company gone into liquidation the week before delivery........what!!! Where did that come from - liquidation -

NO!!!!! Also taking our deposit with them!

To say I was almost in hysterics is a slight understatement - all I could think of primarily was our wedding on the 20th March, 94 in the daytime and 200 guests in the evening with no seats and no tables and the potential for our new restaurant being showcased gone down the pan.

Then I realised we had also taken a booking for the week before that for a local family christening with about 50 adults booked in and numerous kiddie winks.... what a disaster if we had to cancel that booking - we'd be unlikely to get another local booking for months if we didn't fulfill that one! Numerous phone calls and e mails gave us no further information and we had to start making plan B's and plan C's.......... other half Tim was keen to hire and give ourselves the time to look around properly and not rush into another furniture order. The cost of that was really quite high - about £750 for a 2 week hire!

No - I had decided I wanted proper furniture..... so a bit of Twitter and internet searching bought some names to the frame - and a local firm in Exeter called Capricorn Imports. So a quick trundle up the motorway and we found a delightful man - Brian Pengelly - who didn't give us the hard sell, but much more importantly can deliver the week of the 8th March... phew!!

Lovely tables and chairs at a reasonable price AND the chairs we've picked can be covered in exactly the same material - so our colour scheme isn't jeopardised. Double phew...... As for the deposit money to HJ Berry - well, we can probably kiss it goodbye!