I may have said it before, but I'll reiterate. There's nothing like a bit of comedy timing to really focus the mind. For most *normal* people, the prospect of packing-in well-paid jobs, changing countries and buying a new business would be more than enough of a challenge. For some reason though, we thought it would be fun to have a baby at the same time, and for good measure have the due date (1st May) on the day we're due to open the doors of our new business.
Ok, of course that wasn't the plan, but that's the way things have turned out. And so May this year is likely to be a very big month. In more ways than one. So like I was saying, it really focuses the mind. Which is my half-hearted excuse for not really updating this site too much - we've simply been too busy.
So anyway, as I'm sat down writing at the moment, I figured I'd give a run down on everything we've been up to since we left the UK. If you've read the plan (or spoken to us in the last 6 months) you'll know that we're buying an ice cream parlour. However what you may not know is that we purchased the building along with the business. We live above, and the building (when we bought it) was configured as a retail space to the front, small one bed flat to the back. Our plan, from the outset, has been to enlarge the retail space in order to maximise sales space, and therefore (we hope) revenue. It's this construction project that's been taking up all of our time.
From getting permits from the town (council), to finding an architect, briefing him, and telling him we want the plans a week ago, it has all been part of the fun. Not to mention finding out that we needed a carpentry engineer (to tell us what we wanted to do is safe and to also tell us we need a ruddy great big steel plate to reinforce our existing beams!). But, as they say, a picture is worth 1000 words, so here's a couple of thousand… A quick scan of the architects plans both before and after. (The scribbling on the after-plan is my very poor attempt at layout design). Before: 
There are walls lots of walls in the before plan. After:
Not so many walls in the after plan.
What else have we been up to?
Well we've obviously decorated our flat upstairs - but we don't have any after photos yet - but the before photos are now in the photo album. Plus we've made quite good headway in making our architect's plan a reality. There's quite a few photos of Week 1 and Week 2 of our construction project. We also squeezed in visiting a food and restaurant trade show (very handy for suppliers) and have managed to source all the additional equipment we'll need for our enlarged business. We've also been working very hard at nailing the concept down, but not quite got there yet. A new logo is also in the works, when it's finalised I'll post it up here. Right, this is turning into a very long post. More next time. Don't forget to check out the Album - I uploaded quite a few more photos.
