For Whom the Booths Toll

We've been wrestling with booths in the cafe and what seemed at first like a small job has become a big one.  To begin with we needed to get the booths off the wall to uplift the still damp carpet and access the floor.  Young Peter Veneris (the son of Old Peter), told us that they were originally pegged into the wall but during his time in the cafe, the Lockhart kids worked out how to wriggle and jiggle them off the wall.  So not to be beaten by mischievousness, Peter and Jack glued, nailed and screwed the booths in place.  At some stage in their lifetime, the bases of said booths were reinforced with welded steel but by the time we inherited them the steel was fraying and the booths were lopsided and wobbly. But they are a special feature of the cafe and the kids who once sat there jiggling them out of place, are now grown ups with a great nostalgic fondness for the Blue Bird seating.  There was never any doubt that we would keep them.  But they did need some work...a bit more than just a new coat of paint.

So a dozen farmers offering their brawn later, and the booths were free of the wall but so unfortunately, was the render.  The look on Roger's face told me not to over react but fortunately we had done so much deconstruction already that I was no longer upset by the sight of debris.  I took the now rustic looking wall of exposed bricks poking through patches of concrete render, in my stride.

A bit of pondering went on before Roger decided that the best way to ensure we could make future maintenance and repairs without damaging the wall again, was to secure the booths to the floor. Ah, but this required some re-engineering because with one end having previously been the wall, they now looked peg-legged and were less than robust.  So with a little help from friends, a sign writer, the Lockhart Men's Shed and relatives, we have rebuilt, stripped back, sanded, patched, sanded again, undercoated, sanded (a third time) and painted eight booths.  And finally I can see the new colour scheme which I have based on ice cream flavours.

But before the new look is revealed to the world here is a riddle for the kids.

What is hard, slightly pepperminty and stuck to the underside of the Blue Bird Cafe booths?

Answer: 80 years worth of gum, chewed by generations of Lockhart kids and now rock solid (and in some cases painted over by previous owners) but incredibly sticky when warmed by the heat gun when removing the layers of paint.  Yum!