Now it’s worth mentioning at this point that we had little plan to go off for the new store. Mark, our jeweller, had put his drawing skills to work and we had a rough ‘diagram’ to go off. As well as the internal diagram, Mark had sketched ideas for the fascia too and that’s all we had.

We also had little to no project plan or tradespeople lined up to help but we started anyway and Matt organised things as he progressed, from sourcing glass for the windows down to buying the reclaimed brass door handles off eBay.

It wasn’t initially obvious that every wall panel, wire, and screw would need replaced and the shop taken back to bare brick. This realisation swiftly fell on Matt and his partner in crime - Andy (a joiner of 35 years) on day 1 of the build and so the hard work began from the very start.

Around halfway through the build Matt called on David Potts another joiner to give him a hand on a small job. Little did David realise but he was to be the third and final member of the trio and, like Matt and Andy, he’d actually be working on the shop until the very end.

None of them knew but they’d complete the renovation with no toilet or running water for majority of the time, so they were all eternally grateful to Lisa and Louise at Hotpotz for opening their door to three strangers.

The stripping out of all the fixtures and fittings was difficult but looking back was over relatively quickly. Everything remaining was thrown into several skips and before we knew it the shop was an empty shell. This shell took around 4 months to rebuild.

The building offered up some interesting finds during this time – old pennies, skeletons of dead things, lead glass panels and original wood columns to mention a few.

The wooden columns were a decorative column that ran vertically on the outside of the shop. They were beautiful and all original but unfortunately had succumb to rot and water damage over a number of years exposure to the elements. At one point we contemplated restoring them, but they fell to pieces when we removed them and so with deep sorrow, they too like many other things met their fate in the skip!

It appeared during the lifetime of the shop that any new fascia was simply built over the last, so after peeling back the third shop front we uncovered original lead glass. This, like the wood columns was in a sorry state but we managed to work with it and incorporated it into the new shop front.

The build came with other challenges too.

Notably, I recall the day the windows turned up and 5 of us had to move huge panes of glass each weighing about 30 stone with nothing but some gloves. Realising we we were underequipped, the driver even took pity and helped us!

We had a few wrong measurements, a few wrong pots of paint, I may have sanded 4 grooves in the brand new flooring the day after it was laid (they’re still there); I blame the faulty hand sander.

There was casualties too: bruised finger nails, cuts and Matt took the brunt of a stray piece of metal falling on to a table saw which saw shards of metal get stuck in his face and no he didn’t have eye protection.

Nevertheless everyone was alive at the end of the build and nobody had lost any limbs so by that measure it was a success. The store opened 29th November and we’ve never been more thrilled with the result.