After our earlier frustrations with Irving Propane, Amanda Francis (our restaurant Manager) did some investigating and had meetings with another Moncton company, MPS propane. The end result was that we recently switched propane suppliers. MPS came and switched out the Irving tanks, and then installed their own tanks. Our first bill came through recently, and we had been paying about $1.02 per litre for propane from Irving. Our cost through MPS was only 72 cents per litre! That's going to save us a LOT of money over the course of a full year. Their service has been absolutely great, and we highly recommend them if you've got a need for propane in southeastern New Brunswick. Their phone number is 506-855-8459, and they are located at 968 Salisbury Road.
We also applied to the town to get permission to build a sidewalk patio. This was a huge project, which took us much longer to put into motion than we had expected. We started the initial planning and application process in March. It had to receive approvals from several entities within the town and province, so it quickly became obvious that the project could not be completed before Jonathan went out west for the summer. Kasie Morris, one of our restaurant assistants, was given the responsibility for the entire project. The Town approved the idea fairly quickly, by early June. However, at this point, Ducky's became involved. Ducky's was also interested in a sidewalk patio, and since the two businesses have worked so well together in the past, we decided to turn the project into a sort of joint effort. The drawback was that this required additional adjustments to our application, and further approval from the Town. The Town was able to grant that approval five or six weeks ago. At that point, all we needed was a construction contractor to finish submitting official blueprints, and then to construct the patio. That's where things stand right now, because we've found that it's impossible to find such a contractor who has free time to finish the project for us. Considering how late in the year it is, we probably won't be able to get the patio up and running at this point. However, on a very positive note, we'll be able to secure a commitment from a contractor this winter, and we'll be able to get our patio up quickly and early for the summer of 2009, so all the effort this summer wasn't a waste of time.
Now that Jonathan is back, you'll see more posts to this blog occasionally, as we complete dozens of additional small projects that are on our list of "things to do."
