Of course, dismantling the salon a few days ago, removing a few tables and chairs was very much the easy part of the job. Phase two is quite a bit more serious, requiring more manpower and just a few building and/or demolition skills – removing all the wooden beams from around the ceiling space. I did mention in my last post that none of these beams were actually real, and therefore not load bearing, but it still required a bit of skill (and muscle) to take them down.

I guess that many visitors over the years had assumed that the beams were real, but as you can clearly see from today’s photo, these large wooden beams were, in fact, just a bit of wood cladding around a much bigger and uglier concrete beam. The smaller beams running across the ceiling were also purely decorative, and served no practical purpose at all. So much for authenticity!

Phase three,  the rebuilding phase, will not be so easy. The reason I say this is because we haven’t even decided what we are going to do with this space. In the past, it has been used (very infrequently) for meetings and parties, but we feel that it really could be used for something more worthwhile. We are currently scratching our heads.