Winter at Pretty Beach by Polly Babbington (inspirational books txt) 📕

She’d ordered a small white gravel, they’d spent days in wellies shovelling rubble into a skip clearing the whole area and Ben had used old railway sleepers to edge what was left behind ready for the delivery of the gravel. Tonnes of the stones had arrived one Sunday morning on the back of a dumper truck, which had pulled up outside the Orangery, reversed through the double gates and proceeded to pour vast amounts of the small white stones onto the courtyard.

A day or so later, after lining the area with an industrial weed mat and hours and hours of shovelling buckets and buckets of the tiny white stones around, they had aching bones, blistered hands and white dust in every orifice, but also a levelled courtyard hiding the ugly concrete underneath. Once the pea gravel had been washed down and it had rained a few times the whole area looked clean, unified and glinted in the sunshine leading the eye up to the beautiful old door of the Orangery.

It had been a gamble that had paid off very well; the whole area now looking like an entrance rather than a whole lot of nothing, and complete with huge grey pots full of bay trees and shrubs dotted here and there it looked a lot more like the high-end establishments Sallie’s wedding business had to compete with and another one of the headaches with the Orangery had been solved.

***

Ben reversed the car, Sallie undid her seatbelt and hopped out to open the double gates and he reversed in. The back of the car was full of boxes of baubles. Ben turned the car off, pressed the button to open the boot and they started to methodically pull out the boxes full of decor.

Sallie opened the door to the Orangery - the earthy, citrus botanical smell she had come to love in the Orangery hit her nose, but as she stepped in she shivered, it was not warm. The central heating was doing a good enough job to keep the real chill off but if they were going to spend the day in there it would need to be warmer. No wedding guest dressed up in their wedding finery would last more than about five minutes unless it was a whole lot warmer.

She walked across the tessellated floor, under trailing ferns above from the hanging baskets and into the fernery. As she walked in she was taken by surprise at it all, and stopped and looked around. She’d been working so hard she’d not really taken much notice about how different it now looked from that first day when she’d come to view it and had sat with Shane Pence on the old iron table envisioning the fernery as a Gin Room. Now it was very much that vision playing out right there in front of her eyes.

The same iron table she had sat at with Shane, together with other similar ones she’d found online were now clean and sitting down at the end of the narrow room, and the ferns and tropical plants they’d found had gradually come back to life. She’d driven to a closing down nursery sale a one hour drive away, bought as many plants in her budget as she could and planted them all the way down either side and they too were showing signs of loving their new home.

Behind the bar at the end which Ben had made from the old trestle tables was now full with bottles and bottles of gin. Large gin glasses she’d sourced from an industry supplier were stacked up beside the bar behind a plethora of dried herbs. It all looked amazing - they’d turned a rotten old room full of dead plants into a wonderful additional area and all on a very tight budget, not a lot of help and not a lot of leeway for mistakes.

She walked through to the room at the back, now a kitchen - the plumber had piped hot water to the old water troughs, turning them into dishwashing areas and Ben had fitted three dishwashers underneath and covered them all with timber doors she’d painted a dark charcoal grey. Sallie walked behind the counter and turned the thermostat to high and hoped that it didn't take too long to warm the place up - it was another very chilly day and there had even been reports of more snow.

As Sallie walked back through the Orangery, she heard the heating crank on and pulled open the door to help Ben bring in the boxes of decorations. Once all the boxes were in she opened up her laptop and planner to show him in more detail the sketches she’d made with her ideas and some input from Juliette. He leafed through the pages, looked up at the walls and the look on his face was doubtful.

Each of the arched windows, according to Sallie’s plans, was supposed to hold a large oversized wreath. They needed to drag the first tree into the corner and somehow get it to stand up straight in water and all along the back where the bridal party would sit she had envisaged a large, garland made of faux greenery that she was going to intersperse with florist’s oasis, fresh greenery and the vintage, gold baubles and fairy lights.

It was a big ask to fix it all to the panes and Ben’s job was to somehow work out how to not only attach it all, but more importantly, get it to stay up. It was a stroke of luck for her that he was extremely handy, and most of the ideas that she had in the back of her head came to life when he worked on them - he’d done all sorts in the marquee all with great results, but this was a challenge on a whole other level.

He stood there looking up at the glass paned wall, the three