Hello all, i thought it would be good to post a new thread in GD about our new adventure. I posted a thread in the Career development subsection a while ago but now the wheels are turning much faster now so i thought it would be great to document our progress as we make it.
A bit of background.
I've been a chef in the UK for the past 25 years, it has always been a dream of mine to have my own restaurant. I met my wife nearly 6 years ago in the UK, she was on a working visa from New Zealand, we met pretty much as soon as she arrived in the UK, she has a hospitality background too.
Last October, we made the move to New Zealand to start our new life here, and i applied for my permanent residency in February this year. More on that a bit later...
My wife and i went on a short break for our 2nd wedding anniversary in December last year to a beach town in the north called Paihia, on our way back home, we had read about this restaurant called the cider shed, it had great reviews so we were looking forward to it. We arrived there to find it closed, however, we had a look around and thought, what a cool place this is, and didn't understand why it would be closed in summer! Never thought much of it after that.
Fast forward to April this year, i was browsing the businesses for lease / sale, as we were looking for a small cafe or something for our first venture into self employment, and what do i see? Yes, the cider shed had gone up for lease, and at a pretty fair price too. We made some enquiries, went to view it, we already knew we wanted it before we viewed it, we instantly told the real estate agent that we were really interested and went away to look at finances. We went back to view it a second time with the land owner, we wanted to find out what we can and can't do with the land, we told her what we wanted to eventually do, which was to build yurts / cabins for accommodation after we had got the restaurant up and running successfully, she agreed that we could do this if we won the lease, however, there were 2 other interested parties (and a few more after too!). We got a lease agreement to go and run by our lawyer, he looked it over and everything seems fine, but we were worried about the other parties, what if they were more experienced, offered more (because the lease is frankly a bargain for the amount of land we've got). However, it turned out that both the real estate agent and the landlady liked our plans and we were always favourites to win the lease!
Fast forward to 10th July, we finally made it official, we signed the lease, the Cider shed was ours! Now, remember how i said i applied for my permanent residency visa in February? Well, at this point, i had taken a huge risk, as at this point, it hadn't come through yet. Fortunately, almost week later on 16th July i got an email. 'Congratulations, you're permanent residence visa has been approved' Thank goodness for that
At this point, the good news kept coming. We found out the reason that the cider shed had closed in the first place was because the previous owners, (a British couple), had been syphoning money from the business into their personal accounts and eventually went bankrupt. The owner was terrible with money. This worked in our favour, as all the fixtures and fittings had been left, but were not part of the lease, the liquidators had to sell them. We made a cheeky offer of $10k for everything, this included all the kitchen equipment (deep fat fryer, 6 ring burner and oven, chargrill (all blue seal commercial), chest freezers, commercial planetary mixer, all other kitchen stuff, a Traeger smoker plus a huge cabinet smoker, a walk in fridge, a 5 door bar fridge, all tables and chairs, oudoor stage, all beer taps and fittings, 2 huge gas heaters, and much more! We got an absolute bargain!
Anyway, we're at today, we get the keys for the building on 20th August, with our opening planned for October 6th or 13th - to be decided yet. We have a huge amount of work to do. We've secured a bank loan for $16k, and put our life savings and the savings we had for a house deposit into the project so far to pay for licenses, deposits, lawyers and equipment. We've set up a facebook page but we have so much to do, we are both holding full time jobs down too still whilst spending all our spare time doing things for the business. The vision we have for the place is amazing, there's nothing like what we want to do anywhere north of Auckland. We've also set up a pledgeme page to raise a bit more money to help us along the way to buy equipment and to build a fence for security. this will also help us gauge how much interest there is in the venture, from facebook, we've already gathered quite a following, everyone in the area seems really excited for us to open!
If you're interested, feel free to have a look..
http://fb.me/theredhousewarkworth
Wow, a long post so far, sorry if i've bored you lol. Here's some pictures of our investment...
The land we have to play with...
And here's some pictures of the inside so far, and the grounds...
A bit of background.
I've been a chef in the UK for the past 25 years, it has always been a dream of mine to have my own restaurant. I met my wife nearly 6 years ago in the UK, she was on a working visa from New Zealand, we met pretty much as soon as she arrived in the UK, she has a hospitality background too.
Last October, we made the move to New Zealand to start our new life here, and i applied for my permanent residency in February this year. More on that a bit later...
My wife and i went on a short break for our 2nd wedding anniversary in December last year to a beach town in the north called Paihia, on our way back home, we had read about this restaurant called the cider shed, it had great reviews so we were looking forward to it. We arrived there to find it closed, however, we had a look around and thought, what a cool place this is, and didn't understand why it would be closed in summer! Never thought much of it after that.
Fast forward to April this year, i was browsing the businesses for lease / sale, as we were looking for a small cafe or something for our first venture into self employment, and what do i see? Yes, the cider shed had gone up for lease, and at a pretty fair price too. We made some enquiries, went to view it, we already knew we wanted it before we viewed it, we instantly told the real estate agent that we were really interested and went away to look at finances. We went back to view it a second time with the land owner, we wanted to find out what we can and can't do with the land, we told her what we wanted to eventually do, which was to build yurts / cabins for accommodation after we had got the restaurant up and running successfully, she agreed that we could do this if we won the lease, however, there were 2 other interested parties (and a few more after too!). We got a lease agreement to go and run by our lawyer, he looked it over and everything seems fine, but we were worried about the other parties, what if they were more experienced, offered more (because the lease is frankly a bargain for the amount of land we've got). However, it turned out that both the real estate agent and the landlady liked our plans and we were always favourites to win the lease!
Fast forward to 10th July, we finally made it official, we signed the lease, the Cider shed was ours! Now, remember how i said i applied for my permanent residency visa in February? Well, at this point, i had taken a huge risk, as at this point, it hadn't come through yet. Fortunately, almost week later on 16th July i got an email. 'Congratulations, you're permanent residence visa has been approved' Thank goodness for that
At this point, the good news kept coming. We found out the reason that the cider shed had closed in the first place was because the previous owners, (a British couple), had been syphoning money from the business into their personal accounts and eventually went bankrupt. The owner was terrible with money. This worked in our favour, as all the fixtures and fittings had been left, but were not part of the lease, the liquidators had to sell them. We made a cheeky offer of $10k for everything, this included all the kitchen equipment (deep fat fryer, 6 ring burner and oven, chargrill (all blue seal commercial), chest freezers, commercial planetary mixer, all other kitchen stuff, a Traeger smoker plus a huge cabinet smoker, a walk in fridge, a 5 door bar fridge, all tables and chairs, oudoor stage, all beer taps and fittings, 2 huge gas heaters, and much more! We got an absolute bargain!
Anyway, we're at today, we get the keys for the building on 20th August, with our opening planned for October 6th or 13th - to be decided yet. We have a huge amount of work to do. We've secured a bank loan for $16k, and put our life savings and the savings we had for a house deposit into the project so far to pay for licenses, deposits, lawyers and equipment. We've set up a facebook page but we have so much to do, we are both holding full time jobs down too still whilst spending all our spare time doing things for the business. The vision we have for the place is amazing, there's nothing like what we want to do anywhere north of Auckland. We've also set up a pledgeme page to raise a bit more money to help us along the way to buy equipment and to build a fence for security. this will also help us gauge how much interest there is in the venture, from facebook, we've already gathered quite a following, everyone in the area seems really excited for us to open!
If you're interested, feel free to have a look..
http://fb.me/theredhousewarkworth
Wow, a long post so far, sorry if i've bored you lol. Here's some pictures of our investment...
The land we have to play with...
And here's some pictures of the inside so far, and the grounds...
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