Driving Miss Daisy...up the Wall

Here's how the story goes.  Underneath the booths was carpet.  Old carpet, still damp and not very hygienic or able to be cleaned.  As far as the health inspector was concerned..the carpet had to go.  It should in fact have been put out of its misery years ago but somehow, the old 1980s carpet was still hanging in there under the booths.

Okay so to get he carpet up, we had to pull up the booths.  Now if I had really thought about it at all, I would have realised that there was a lot more to it than just pointing my magic wand at the booths and asking a bunch of burley farmers to pull them up.  But that is sort of what I did.  Well, in terms of the burley farmers, not the magic wand because if I possessed one of those, I would ave waved it at the whole cafe and we would be done and dusted by now.  However, the very obliging burley farmers pulled up the booths which, I had it on good authority, had been plugged, bolted, nailed and glued into place.  Along with the booths, came the wall render and suddenly we were looking directly at brickwork though thankfully not, straight through to our neighbour's shop.

Oh great, now we had to fix the wall as well as the floor underneath.  It was a problem that required some contemplation, some lost sleep and a bit of blinkering so we wouldn't be reminded that we are not plasterers while we got on with other jobs.  In the end we couldn't ignore the problem any further and so Roger had a go at plastering 101, with average success.  Apparently there are still some things that you can't learn from the internet.

But fortune came to our rescue through a chance meeting with a real plasterer and we were saved.  Many early starts, hot sweaty days and a bit of plastering apprenticeship later and we have our walls back, minus the holes.  To boot we have been regaled with colourful tales of the life of our handyman saviour and his dog.  So now, with just over a week to Christmas, we can finally start painting the walls and laying the lino on the floor.  Phew!

P.S. Underneath the plywood panel in the window we found another strange relic of the past.  The signature Bullock Douglas and a pencil sketch of a profile.  Who was Bullock Douglas?  Was he the artist who painted the original window motifs in the 1930s renovation?  Or is this signature more recent?

The Mercury Rises

Summer kicked in with a vengeance last week with temperatures rising to the high 30s, bringing thunderstorms laden with humidity and an ill-timed power cut.  With the town sweltering in the dark, even just for a few hours the night the power outage took away our air-conditioners, we decided to take advantage of the heatwave by opening our front door to cold drinks and ice creams.  Turning back the clock on the cafe means turning back the menu as well so we are serving traditional soda soft drinks with flavours such as portello, sarsparilla, lime, creaming soda and raspberry lemonade.  Eventually we plan to go back to the traditional scoop ice creams as well but for the moment we have popular pre-packaged varieties in our freezer.  And for the homesick kiwis we offerLemon and Paeroa soft drink for that little slice of heaven in the heat that is world famous in New Zealand.  It has already proven popular enough for us need to restock the fridge.

Later this week on Friday 7th December, Lockhart has it's Christmas late night trading with market stalls along Green Street.  The Blue Bird will be there trading again but this time we will have some little Christmas morsels like canoli and seasonal truffles.  We will also be having a book sale to support the restoration project funds so we hope people will find Christmas gift options and great summer reading matter among the late release second-hand books in our collection.  There will be more books on sale at the cafe over the summer because as a librarian in my past life, I know how much books, coffee and the social space of a cafe go hand-in-hand.

Little by little we get closer to being fully open and we thank all those who have stopped in to buy drinks, offer advice, information and lend a hand. It won't be too much longer now...with a little bit of luck.