Telford family creates garden pub to enjoy during lockdown
A family from Telford have transformed an old summer house and bits of recycled furniture into their very own backyard bar.
Chris and Trish Smout, who live in Dawley with their three children, Morgan, 15, Lily, 11 and Sienna, nine, decided to up-cycle and re-use pieces of furniture they were going to throw out to transform an old summer house into The Pip Inn – named after their late dog Pippin.
Trish decided to entire Chris’s hard work into Liberty Games' competition to find the UK’s best ‘home bar’ and they are in with the chance of winning a year’s supply of free beer, worth over £300.
She said: “My husband has worked so hard on it while he’s been out of work due to the lockdown. He even added a ladies’ lounge for me and our daughters and decorated it with Disney ears which we had ready for our holiday which got cancelled, so it means a lot.
“It has kept Morgan busy because he missed out on his work experience at school so this has helped keep him active and learn something.
“The kids love playing darts with their dad. It’s just such a lovely place, it feels like we are somewhere else. It backs onto the woodland as well so feels like we could be anywhere, not just a housing estate.”
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Chris, 38, is a groundsworker and wanted to keep busy while the site he was working on shut, and Trish, 39, said it has been a great distraction for everyone – especially while she works from home as well as home-schooling.
The main structure of the shed was made from old site herding that was being removed from a building site and the classing, the bar, and the seats were recycled from the family’s old summer house, along with the doors.
The bar was an old dining room table that was going to be thrown away, similarly, the flooring was left over from a school hall refurbishment. The windows were ordered for a job but were the wrong size, so the site manager let Chris buy them and donated the money to charity.
Trish added: “It was a complete scrap heap challenge project, up-cycling and building from scratch. It is just so nice to have somewhere to go when the pubs are shut – the neighbours can’t wait to be allowed round!”
