The Joy of Painting and other hard work

by Admin | 8 Jan 2021 | building works

The last post on here (before the latest lockdown) was about painting preparations. Well, painting work is well underway now, and in fact almost finished. The dust sheets are still up, but if you peer in you can just about make out what’s going on. Joe, Gerry and Alan, with help from other volunteers, have been beavering away in two-hour shifts, broken up by two-hour intervals. The intervals allow for airing the space out between volunteers. Because they’ve been working alone, it’s been a lonely task, but at least they’ve not spent their time chatting, eh? Gotta look on the bright side. Huge thanks to all of them.

Here’s what one volunteer (Joe Keating, pictured), said about why he volunteered.

“I volunteered for painting to support the important library project.  It feels good to play a small part in this long-term voluntary effort.  Those involved in the planning, fundraising and monitoring of the building process have given enormous amounts of time, work, expertise and persistence over several years.  They deserve every assistance in completing the library for our community.”

Thanks also go to the generous donation of quality paint obtained for us by supporter Ellen Alsbrooks. This is truly a community effort and the library is very much a joint effort. It will be lovely to see all contributors in the library when we finally open later this year.

As well as the painting work, Alan is also now working on a solution to affix all of the shelves to the walls, and to build our movable shelving. Once this is completed, we’ll be able to restart book cataloguing, as far as Covid regulations permit. Once the stock is catalogued, it will be sorted and shelved. We’ll be making calls to the book stock team in due course for volunteers for these tasks.

Meanwhile, the background preparations are also ongoing. There are volunteer handbooks and policies to write, instruction manuals and training programmes to finalise, an intranet to be built, and many, many more tasks. So far this year we’ve clocked up an impressive 113 hours of volunteering time between us.