And so begins a wild new adventure…

Street view of the building from North Bondgate, Bishop Auckland

I bought a Chinese takeaway. And by “Chinese takeaway” what I actually mean is a the vacant building that used to be a Chinese takeaway restaurant.

Although I have been in the process of buying the building since September, and therefore should be pretty comfortable with the idea, it still feels bizarre to say out loud that I’ve bought a commercial building. Bizarre, and exciting.

So, what will I be doing with this building? In a nutshell, the Plan A idea is to turn the upstairs into a fibrespace/yarn shop and home-office-away-from-home, while renting out the downstairs to another creative small business (to be identified). The building is/could be super cute on the outside, but the inside is a hot mess. So in the near term I’ll be focused on getting all of the previous owner’s stuff cleared out, selling the extensive commercial kitchen, and finding an architect to help me come up with a plan for the vast interior space. Looks can be deceiving, the building is more than twice the size of our house!

I’m going to try to post regular updates and pictures here so that anyone who is interested can find out where I’m at with this mammoth project whenever you like. I also think that having a record of this journey will a nice gift to myself once I get to the end of it (and hopefully that will keep me motivated to post fairly frequently). Kieran and I are collecting the keys tomorrow, so there should be more to say soon…

(NOTE: There’s a ‘subscribe’ button on the main page; I couldn’t figure out how to add one to this post.)