The Restoration Project

Here is an insight into some of the restoration work we have undertaken on this 110-year old shop.  After so many almost continuous years as a working cafe, and two floods, the poor thing needed a bit of a break to receive the full health spa treatment.  Roger is the handy man using all his skills and brawn to do the majority of the work.  Where it is new territory for him, he is a fast learner getting a crash course in restoration 101 inspired by Grand Design's Kevin McLeod but fortunately Roger's dad has contacts in the building industry and they have provided lots of advice and a hand when we have needed it.

My skills come in with the interior decoration and the shop side of things.  The Blue Bird has had her colours done and the ones I chose turned out to be pretty close to the original colour scheme.  We want to restore the look and feel of the cafe 60 or 70 years ago when she was in her heyday.  Her Art Deco mirrors are her glamour feature from the past but we also want to bring back the ambiance of a community place that is very much in the present day.  The Blue Bird should be as relevant to Lockhart now as it was in the 1930s when the milk bar and booths were first put in to modernize the shop.

And if we can bring back the memories of childhood, the happy days of family holidays, kids in a hot car on a road trip begging to stop at the milk bar for a soda and a sundae, travelling salesmen stopping for a perk-me-up coffee and a mixed grill, yet at the same time making new ones, that too would be great...

Meals at all Hours – no more. When we found her in February 2012, the Blue Bird Cafe was empty, abandoned and neglected yet we could see that she had known better days and with a little help from friends, could be revived.

We were immediately inspired by the Art Deco mirrors over the booths and the original milk bar installed in 1930 with soda fountains and ice cream barrels. We want to restore these and have them a unique feature of the café again. But first there is work to do…

We asked an expert in heritage architecture how long the buildings along Green Street in Lockhart were intended to last when they were originally erected on the back of the wool boom of Brookong Station. His opinion was that the shops built quickly, cheaply and speculatively by a handful of developers were intended to last as long as the boom time which could have been anything between 5 to 10 years. Life and fortune was uncertain in the early 20^th Century and not many knew if they would still be in Lockhart on the land for a generation let alone two or three.

So there was no real need to lay foundations and as was the practise in England, the buildings were laid directly on the clay ground. Trees were cleared but the stumps were not even necessarily pulled out. We found three stump remnants in the ground under the booths. The footings for our building were simply cyprus pine joists laid on top of bricks with an airspace of between 15 and 30cms all that separated soil and tongue and groove cyprus timber floorboards.

One hundred and nine years later, years of drought and two consecutive floods, and the building itself is not in great shape. Add to that the continuous service as a cafe with countless meals prepared, many bottoms sitting on booths, hundreds of feet treading the floor and generations of small mischievous fingers and heals poking at places they oughtn't and we inherited the cafe.

Question for the kids: What lies beneath the Blue Bird floor?

Answer: So far we have found lost marbles, broken crockery, two tree stumps, a glass bottle stop and fragments of original mosaic lino floor tiles but no chest full of buried treasure unfortunately.

NEWS FLASH!! October 2013

The Milk Bar is up and running again.  Our restoration project on the 1930s milk bar has reached the point where the freezer store is working again with the installation of a modern freezer under the original exterior.  The round tubs in which the scoop ice cream used to arrive from Peters Ice Cream Co., were discontinued about a year ago so it was a hard task to find new tubs that would fit the old dimensions of our bar.

However, after extensive searching and some trial and error we have found a solution and can now serve our own version of the Veneris' Orange Ale at the bar.  We do not have the original recipe but given that the icy drink was so fondly remembered by so many people, and a proud family signature drink, we wanted to pay tribute to Peter by serving something we hope is at least close to his famous refreshment.  We call our version Orange Crush and it is really a granita or a natural version of the cordial slushy popular with today's kids.   We use freshly squeezed orange and you can be assured that there are no added colours in our drink.  Some of the local kids have tried it and approve and as the weather warms up, we are hoping that it will catch on.

The Booths Are Back October 2014

The booths returned to the cafe in October 2014.  The same old booth seats now have a new look with colours chosen to reflect ice cream flavours: Honeydew Heaven, Vanilla Cream and Mango Smoothie.  Because history is not just the past but also a present that we build into the future, we have added our own personal touches.  We hope that, as present caretakers of The Blue Bird, these additions will add to the aesthetic pleasure of the booths in years to come.  The new design features are: the end piece nearest the wall built to balance and strengthen the booth; the waterfall motif at the junction of the wall and table designed to mimic the pattern around the mirror; and the propellor pattern on the ends of each booth.  In restoring the booths we wanted to rekindle the wow-factor that would have accompanied them when they first appeared in the 1930s.  I hope you agree that the booths are looking sharp and swanky now.

The first booth to be re-furbished 2014.

 

The way the booths looked in July 2012.

Supporting the sagging ceiling so that the original decorative horse-hair plaster from the 1930s could be reattached to the beams and hopefully saved.  It is an ongoing project as it is the biggest rescue job that we face in the building.  Most plasterers will tell you it's not worth doing but if we believed that, then we would not have started any of this in the first place.

If any children from the past 80 years would like to come forward and claim the gum they stuck under the tables at the Blue Bird, I have a scraper and a job for you to do.  Yeeeew!

After struggling with massively heavy and unwieldy 'agro-props', Roger had came up with this innovative way of propping up the ceiling using car jacks and concrete blocks.

Booth restoration was my job at the start and I worked out an assembly line method of painting three coats on the various components of six booths.  This ground work was done very early on and the results of my masterpiece have yet to be fully revealed.

Proving that I did some work on the restoration and didn't just leave it all up to Roger.  Here I am scraping paint off the booths.

The signature of a previous booth painter.  Underneath the booths we discovered that each painter had signed their name and date in their layer of paint colour.  Of course I added my own signature in 2012.  The booths are part of the continuing story of the restoration project.

Restoring the booths, Roger and Matt put the booths back together in three days before Spirit of the Land weekend in October 2014.