As the Tuesday Club deliberated a long list of various maintenance tasks to identify the priority jobs down at the Bonded Warehouse, a bright spark felt that it was a good time for re-painting the front of the offices as the weather was set fair for the foreseeable future – a fair point and indeed a correct one as we made the most of rubbing down and making good the fascia before applying a generous top cost of Magnolia in dry and very warm conditions.

But of course these jobs are never quite as simple as they first seem – the building frontage is of course very large and ladder / platform work was also needed – all taking time to assemble etc.  We adopted the adage that the preparation is most important and this was very true as we chipped away ‘blown’ bricks and made good the building surface, bleached the sandstone parapet which was infiltrated with algae and moss as well as the more routine task of cleaning the windows, rubbing down the old window frames and effectively dusting down the whole area to be painted.

Magnolia was the colour of choice and to be fair the application of this was done remarkably quickly – the parapet and brickwork at ground level was another story – using specialist water-based bitumen style paint proved difficult as the soaring temperatures made the liquid solidify surprising rapidly onto the disposable brushes which needed to be  regularly discarded as being rendered unusable when attempting to cut in to the magnolia. Our Chairman, David Caunt, got stuck into the fiddly bits of painting the narrow window frame in its original dark green and the shutters were cleaned off. I must admit and hopefully you will agree that this volunteer work, undertaken over 5 consecutive Tuesdays has really improved the look of the building (as well as giving it good protection for the winter months) and will be a nice backdrop to the Open Weekend which takes place towards the end of October – a job which initially seemed to be routine but turned out to be hard but rewarding work – the Tuesday Club can feel justifiably proud of this achievement.

Della, our newest volunteer was intrigued as to what was behind the locked shutters by the Avery weighbridge and these were opened up for the first time in many years to reveal windows, very dirty windows. Typical of Della though she set to task enthusiastically in cleaning these down both inside and out, shutters were cleaned and the intention is to use this window to enhance the Santa experience.

The weighbridge itself was also cleaned off with years of embedded debris removed from the cast iron lettering with some of this highlighted in white paint – the barrier at the end was also given a good lick of black and white paint and sets it all off nicely.

So, that “lick of paint” was something of an understatement but in the end a fine job was done and the Tuesday Club move on to the next priority job (I’m keeping my mouth shut this time!).