Taming the Wild West

In my worst moments, I have been compared with Basil Fawlty. I'd like to think that the only reason for this is that I'm tall and my wife isn't, but I suspect there may be other reasons for it. You may recall that in one episode of Fawlty Towers, Basil employed a builder called O'Reilly who put a door in a weight-bearing wall and used an ordinary piece of timber as a lintel. That is something that could all too easily happen to me, because I am putty in the hands of plausible builders.

It is for that reason that we have surrounded ourselves with a good posse led by a marshal who knows how to tame the cowboys. Martyn Bennett is acting as our clerk of works, ably assisted by James Quick as site foreman, and together they have ensured that I am not landed with any cowboys. Highshore Construction are doing the bulk of the building work, and so far it's all going very well.

I'll mention everyone sooner or later, but for the moment let me pay tribute to two other key advisers. Richard Faux of Crescent Retail Installations is providing the shopfitting and design service, and has been slogging up and down the motorway at unearthly hours to do it. Stephen Tucker of SMT Associates is liaising with the various planning and building control departments, and the two of them are producing ever more complex drawings which I barely understand, though I disguise this well by at least knowing which way up they go. Their ability to have a conversation they both appear to understand while imagining the three-dimensional layout of the interior and marking in the air where a particular electrical socket or air vent will be is quite spectacular.

Just to prove something is happening inside now, here's a sneaky peek at the ceiling frame that James and his team have fashioned over the new dispensary and medicines counter. They've gained a few inches of precious height and smoothed out a lot of the ups and downs in the ceiling heights.

It may not look much, but it's the start of something big.

Master of the House

If you know the musical "Les Misérables", you may recall the song that gives this post its title, sung by the innkeeper Monsieur Thénardier, in which he notes all the little extras he manages to slip onto his guests' bills. Meat goes a lot further if you can add the occasional cat, and it is quite reasonable to charge for the wear and tear guests put on the mirrors.

There are times when I wonder whether his descendants work for utility companies. I can understand that there is always a bit of uncertainty about the estimates, but there seems to be a practice of not including items that were going to be needed, if they don't form part of the main work. Thus, you get a quote for a certain amount, and then they tell you later that the necessary safety testing will be another £500.

This strikes me as a cracking wheeze, but unfortunately there is very little scope for pharmacists to do the same. For example, we can't make up someone's antibiotics and then tell them it will be an extra 20p for us to put a cap on the bottle.

The building is beginning to move quickly now. The necessary pillars have been beefed up or built, and the new steel girders are in place, so the last time I looked in the men from Highshore Construction were busily framing out the ceilings. No doubt the next twelve weeks will pass all too quickly.

We've seen a few people pushing their noses up against the windows to see what is happening. There's no need - we'll post photos on here from time to time to keep Truro posted on its new pharmacy and café

Cables and copper

This is the point at which I express admiration for the various people working with us who get excited about wires, pipes and drains. I'm glad somebody does, because a building that didn't have them wouldn't be much use, but I sit in the midst of conversations, not one word of which I really understand, as learned people argue about routes, first fixes, access points, comms rooms and hubs.

This project involves a lot of people working together. In no particular order, these include Kevin from Bush Telegraph, who are installing our phones; Paul from ADT, who is responsible for alarms and closed circuit television, Bill and Priscilla from Positive Solutions, who supply our tills and computers and arrange the secure NHS broadband we have to have, and Peter who is installing the ducting so we don't asphyxiate during the day. Fortunately, David from Crescent seems to speak the language of them all, and has been keeping track of everyone's needs. I have high hopes that when the building is finished, the right wires will be in the right places.

The electricians are about to start work. This is the bit I understand (to a point). I'm reasonably good on plumbing too, because I know water needs pipes, and any other way of delivering water to sinks and basins will end in tears. But when it comes to Cat5 and twisted pairs and Broadband secured in a particular way, I smile benignly and leave them to it. Each to his own.

Our best guess at the moment is that everyone will be off site by 17th June (our daughter's birthday) so we can move in on 20th June (our 30th wedding anniversary). Not much partying that weekend, though.

Turning point

The asbestos men have been and gone, and we've reached a turning point in the refurbishment. We've cleared out what's going, and now we're ready to start putting new things in.

The structural steel is on its way and the electrician will be moving in to start work. The wiring is being concealed so far as possible, so he needs to be the first one involved. The whole building is being rewired, because it wasn't worth trying to tease out which bits of wiring were new and which were elderly; better by far to know it's all modern and up to standard.

I've spent much of the last week signing contracts for alarms, CCTV, telephones and so on. On top of that, we have to apply to a lot of people for permission to move. The one thing they have in common is that they all charge a fee.

Nevertheless, we know it will all be worth it in the end.

Fiddling on the roof

I had an unusual experience last Thursday. The roof is designed so that there are two peaks running across the building with a flat roof between forming the valley. The flat roof was leaking so the builders had been up to inspect, and thought I might like to go up there too to see what they found.

I don't have much of a head for heights, but somehow being between the two roof-crests seemed quite safe, so up I went. The view of Truro is very good, and on a sunny day the cathedral looks golden and inviting from up there.

The builders wanted me to see the handiwork of a previous builder, probably long gone to his reward. Call me a pedant, but I think tiles ought to be fixed to the battens rather than flapping about, and I quite like the roof felt to extend over the gutter so the runoff drops in. I also think that flashing ought to be tucked under something rather than leaning negligently against the adjoining wall, and even I know that a soakaway drain only works if it is lower than the surrounding flat roof, not if it is 1½ inches higher. That lot aside, everything was hunky-dory.

It will cost a few bob to put that lot right, but it will make the flats a lot more comfortable. And it will remind me to check my own roof at home a bit more often.

During my flights of fancy, I had contemplated asking if we could install solar panels on those roofs, where they wouldn't be seen. I now realise that if we had done that they would probably have fallen into the floor below, so I think we'll leave well alone.

Onwards and upwards

So far I've concentrated on the ground floor redevelopment, but now it's time to talk a bit about the upstairs changes.

The public toilets for the pub were at the western end of the upper storey. You then came to the front door of the manager's flat, which spanned the middle of the floor. Beyond that there was the pub's kitchen, a storage room and a function room.

I like the function room, except for the carpet. The panelling is warm without being oppressive, and the bookcase is wonderful if, like me, you love books. The fireplace isn't functioning, but it has a handsome surround with inset tiles.

Here are a couple of pictures so you can see what I mean. Unfortunately I didn't snap the bookcase, which is opposite the door.

Last week I met one of the gentlemen who installed the long table. The extension leaves drop on once the frame has been opened out with a crank handle. One of the delights of this whole exercise has been that we've met a lot of people with a connection to The Globe, including a past landlord, the descendants of a Victorian landlord, and a retired gentleman who helped with some building there when he had just left school. We'd be very pleased to hear from anyone who has a story to tell about The Globe.

In the rebuild, the function room remains intact, though we plan to replace the large table with more flexible separate rectangular tables. The manager's flat is being enlarged by including the area of the two public toilets and then being divided into two, so we shall have a front flat and a back flat, each of them one-bedroomed. There is no car parking with them, but we hope they would be suitable for retired people who are mobile enough to get upstairs, or perhaps younger people who don't need a car.

Our plan is to clear the upper storey now, so all required demolition has been done before any building takes place. The next step is to complete the ground floor and rewire the flats, then we'll carry out any building, with the finishing of the flats done after the pharmacy is open so as not to delay that.

The creation of flats was one of the reasons the council gave for approving the application. They are very keen to encourage people living in the city centre, and we're delighted to play our part in making that happen. On my travels around the country one of the main sources of jealousy I encounter is that we can walk to work in around ten minutes, and I should probably do it more often.

Before and after

It's time to look a little more closely at the changes. A pub has little booths and corners that any kind of shop wouldn't want, so we needed to open out the lower floor so far as we could. At the same time, there are some historic features we don't want to spoil, and the next few pictures show these.

In the café area there is some wooden panelling. Some of the modern wood has been stained rather darker than it needs to be, so we have to look at lightening that wood and providing more consistent lighting. No two wall lights seem to be the same, which either adds to the charm or drives you daft, depending on how you look at it.

You can see part of the old flint wall we'll leave untouched, and a corner of a modern black fire surround that may find itself replaced.

The second feature we need to keep is the floor. Parts of it are old slate or granite, but other parts are more modern slate. 

As you can see, the slate is very dark, so we need to add as much light as possible elsewhere. We also have low ceilings, which means the lights don't spread very far and we need a lot of them to light the interior.

We also need to keep the Victorian winding staircase at the back.

The ceiling may look very quaint but it's actually modern. Those beams are pieces of ordinary 2x2 softwood nailed to the ceiling and painted dark brown.

As we opened out the lower floor we have removed some of the wood cladding on the beams and areas of modern ceiling. Coupled with removing some interior walls it's surprising how much difference that makes, particularly because it has shown that the ceiling was lower in some areas than it needed to be. To illustrate the point, here are a pair of photos taken from roughly the same spot looking towards the front doors.

The item in the foreground of the lower picture is part of the bar that is headed for recycling. You'll also note that the floor has been covered with heavy gauge polythene to protect it. In the background you can see yet another type of wall light.

This is a good moment to thank our neighbours, who have been very understanding, particularly Graham Morris in Edward Street who has allowed us to keep a skip in his driveway so we can get rubble off the site as quickly as possible.

There is still plenty to do, and it doesn't look much like a pharmacy yet. But it will.

Ask no questions, tell no lies

Every year pharmacies have a conduct a Community Pharmacy Patient Questionnaire (CPPQ) as part of their NHS contract. The questions are fixed, but you can add one of your own.

This has always seemed to us to be a pointless exercise. Unlike GPs and NHS dentists, we don't have patient lists, so if a patient isn't happy with the service they get from a pharmacy, they just move with the minimum of fuss. Obviously that becomes harder if there is just one in a town, but in Truro, where we have five pharmacies, it still gives plenty of choice.

This is not to say that we think that patient opinion isn't worth having - just that the CPPQ is an inflexible and time-consuming way of getting it. To give an example, we have to collect 125 questionnaires. In every year, 123 or 124 have rated us excellent or very good. That's nice to know, but it doesn't help us improve.

This year we asked patients what we don't do that they would like. The answers were interesting, partly because the wish list included a lot of things we already do - cholesterol testing, for example. One patient asked us to install chairs for patients, which leads me to wonder what she thought she was sitting on when she filled it in. A couple asked us to install a consultation room, which we have had for several years. It's small, but it exists. We don't use it as much as we'd like because it's small.

In The Globe we will have two consultation rooms. One will be for our everyday use, and will be in the corner of the pharmacy alongside the dispensary. The other, near the front doors, will be available for hire by other healthcare professionals, so we hope to have other services we can offer on our site. For the first time, we'll have customer toilets, including a disabled toilet, and of course we'll have the café so customers can have a cuppa and a sit down.

That extra question on last year's CPPQ has given us a number of ideas, so we must thank the anonymous contributors who made the suggestions. By all means use the comments box here to keep them coming. We can't guarantee they can all be worked in at this stage, but we'll certainly give them all some thought.

Restoration

Just after Christmas, we paid a visit to Warwick, where we had lunch at the Thomas Oken Tea Rooms. I can recommend the pork pie.

Thomas Oken died in 1573, and the tea rooms occupy his house, which is therefore around 450 years old. Despite this, you can see from the photograph that it has electric lights. (Check out http://www.okentearooms.co.uk/index.htm for a fuller description.)

Bringing old buildings up to date is a challenge, and one we face at The Globe. The building has been in only intermittent use for some time now, and would need quite a lot of repair whatever we did with it. Converting it into a pharmacy and café is not at all straightforward, but we have been touched by the degree of goodwill from planners, local councillors and the council's conservation staff.

The Globe is a grade 2 listed building dating from around 1840. Older Truronians will remember when the bar was on the right side and the double doors opened into an internal courtyard. There were a lot of partitions inside that divided the space into small booths or enclosures, and a lot of pillars. The floor and ceiling levels don't line up across the building. Some of the old-looking features are bogus (the ceiling beams consist of bits of 2x2 stuck together in pairs) but some original features are still there. With the help of Dr Gale at Cornwall Council, and Stephen Tucker of SMT Associates, who has been advising us, we have been able to identify the antique features we need to keep.

The frontage is going to be unaltered. There is some restoration to do, but the plan cannot be changed, nor would we want to. Inside, the old granite and slate floor is staying, as is the slate floor that was laid in more recent times. There is a Victorian staircase at the back that will be staying, and a couple of old fireplaces that will not be visible, but will be preserved behind the shelving units. In the café area some wooden panelling will help to make it feel cosy, and there is some original wall. The section in the café, and a length of wall in the new dispensary, will be left uncovered, and the rest will be preserved behind shelving. The shelving, by the way, is being cunningly anchored so as not to damage the old wall.

All this adds to the cost of the work, but we think it's important. After all, you can't put history back later.

On the other hand, buildings have to earn their keep. We have to have burglar and fire alarms, we need a lot of electricity sockets and readers will be pleased to hear that there will be indoor water closets.

We are the last people to want to vandalize anything historic, but if we try to freeze buildings at a point in time, they stop being useful. And the toilets would be in the back yard. None of us would want that.