There has been a great deal of interest in the Northern Rivers Hotel in North Lismore since our news story on August 11 announcing that Len and Julie Durheim had purchased the pub and were going hard to renovate the building before Christmas.

As you can see from the outside (for those that have not driven past and seen the progress made) it is already looking so much better than it did three months ago.

Three generations of Durheim's will be involved in the hotel with Len and Julie owning it, son Tony and his team (including his son and son-in-law) fixing it up and Tony's daughter Laura being the licensee.

(Len, Laura and Tony Durheim outside of the new look Northern Rivers Hotel)

Anyone who has had a drink at the Rous or the Gollan over the last 20 years will know the name Darrell Crockford.

"He's born and bred Lismore, about 300 hundred metres down the road, just on the other side of the Richmond River School," Tony told the Lismore App during a renovation update.

"Darrell knows everyone over this side of town and we're really stoked to have him on board."

The great news for patrons is the likely opening of the beer garden and drive-through bottleshop this Friday or Saturday depending on how the work progresses this week.

When the Lismore App caught up with Tony Durheim, he and the team were hard at work on the beer garden laying pavers.

"We will make sure that we have good food, cold beer and a bit of entertainment. We'll certainly bring back the Sunday Session and I dare say it might be Friday night as well. We're also looking at a Friday night pizza night like it used to be here. We're open to any ideas."

The beer garden will have two undercover huts with the rest exposed benches that will be 70% covered with sails so even on a hot day you'll be undercover. One of the new ideas is a Can Bar in the beer garden.

"You can buy beer at the Can Bar, so you don't have to go through the pub plus there's also the kid's playground which has been cleaned and repainted."

(The before and after photos of the Northern Rivers Hotel. August 2023 above and November 2023 below)

Inside the Northern Rivers Hotel, there will also be new concepts while other traditions stay.

"Inside there'll be another kid's area, a kid's room we're going to call it. It's going to have Playstations and stuff like that so the kids can sit in there and Mum and Dad can have their dinner in peace and quiet."

Tony thinks it will be another three to four weeks before the main bar can open to the public and an official opening can occur.

"The pub itself. Upstairs is all but done, we just need to carpet one side and then do a few touch-ups. There are 15 rooms up there that will all be leased out to the Casino Meatworks starting the first of January next year."

"As we've gone along we've found things that were no good. We had no sarking in the roof, so the roof had to come off, new sarking and new battens then put the roof back on and put 96 solar panels on to help reduce the cost of our cool rooms."

"The timber windows were seventy years old. It had broken windows, broken sash cords so it was just cheaper to put aluminium ones in. Downstairs in the dining room, the dining room floor had been timber and probably had twenty floods pass over it over the seventy years. It was done and we pulled it out and concreted that whole area."

"We're not using the cellar anymore downstairs because the smallest of small floods and you've got problems down there. So we've turned another room upstairs into a new cool room."

"The main bar is something we're into at the moment. All the walls downstairs were fibro cement over the old tiles that were 70 years old. We've ripped all that off, ripped the tiles off and now we're rendering it so for the next flood we have we just hose it out. Everything we've tried to do, we've tried to keep in mind that when we get another small flood, we're a couple of days closed and then we're back into it."

Tony said he has been inundated with phone calls already from people wanting to book 21st, birthdays or Christmas parties. They will be a reality in early December.

Standby for an exact completion date for the newly renovated Northern Rivers Hotel.