Lubbock Community Theatre Blog

Thank you for joining me once again, as we join our renovations in progress . . .

So last Saturday was a HUGE day for us!  The purpose for the new office/annex space is starting to become a reality.  In order for us to use this new space as our backstage area (dressing, makeup, greenroom), it has to have access to the stage, am I right?  Well now it does!

But it wasn’t easy.  We think when they were building this strip mall (sometime in the ’60’s we guess), they built each building individually, adding them onto each other instead of doing it all at once.  Because the wall between the old backstage and the new was like 14 inches thick, made of brick, concrete and terra cotta blocks!  It took circular saws with diamond tipped blades, hammers, chisels and sledge hammers all day to open up a hole big enough for the new fire door to fit.  We hauled away like 6 wheelbarrows full of debris!  Richard, Stan, Justin and Russell, we are forever in your debt!  They did an amazing job cutting the hole, and only minor injuries were sustained!

But there’s more!  Jim and Nancy began fixing up the new bathrooms.  Jim and Chase got the counter in the green room faced and ready to paint.  Jonathan and Gabriel helped us out with painting and knocking out the wall.  Patti and Kadi worked on installing the baseboards.  And don’t forget our board members: Julie, Gloria, Kim, John, Jay, Jim and Kevin!  So much going on!

Saturday will be another big day.  We should finally be able to start on the actual theatre space.  Hopefully we’ll be able to get all the old green carpet torn out, start work on lowering the stage, and maybe even start painting the lobby.  We’ve got David, who’s an interior designer at Tech, helping us redesign our lobby and public facing areas; I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s going to look wonderful!

Check out all the pics below, and we’ll see you on Saturday!

Katie

Hello again!  Sorry it’s taken me all week to get these new photos up.  We actually weren’t in town last Saturday for the flooring work call, so I stopped by on Wednesday to get these pics.

And boy does it look great!  I guess I hadn’t realized what a difference nice new carpet and tile will make.  I’ll admit, when we painted the chocolate wall in the reception room, it didn’t look great with only the bare concrete next to it.  But I think with the nice light carpet, it really stands out!  Jay and John have got their offices all set up, and you can see in the pics the new vinyl baseboards (generously donated by Sutherlands!) laid out on the floor, getting straightened out so that we can get them installed at tomorrow’s work call.

Speaking of work calls, we’re gonna go ahead and have a standing 9:00 am Saturday work call until all of the renovations are finished.  Tomorrow, we will be touching up the tile and carpet, putting up the baseboards, and starting on the door in the back room that will connect the office/annex space to the actual backstage area.  I am so excited about this part!  Connecting the new and the old spaces is the whole point of the new backstage area, and it’s really gonna happen!

As always, thank you so much to all the wonderful volunteers who have been coming out and giving up their Saturday mornings to this enterprise.  And a special thank you to Stan, Kadi and Justin Robinson: with their knowledge and experience, we would not be able to make the progress we have to this point.

See you tomorrow!

Katie

Hi again everyone!

Boy, Saturday sure was a long, HOT day!  We started early, but it was worth it to beat the heat (thanks Julie and Kim for the doughnuts!)  But everybody had lots of fun painting our new office/annex space.  I’m not gonna lie: the place was not in the best of shape.  There were tons of holes in the walls, and Lord knows what is was we were wiping off all the surfaces.  The bottom of the walls where we took off the old baseboards was pretty torn up.  I think we’re either looking to get vinyl baseboards donated, or we’ll either ask some home improvement stores for their scrap 1″ x 4″, and then paint it or seal it or something.

We were lucky though to pull together a bunch of scrap paint in similar colors, and then just dumped them into big plastic buckets and mixed it all up together.  The beige and green buckets we ended up with actually turned out to be really nice shades, despite the fact we put together like 5-7 different colors of each.  Thank goodness for Jim bringing the power drill with the paint mixer attachment!

We didn’t get quite as far along as we had hoped to, but the place already looks so much better!  Jay and John’s office are now blue!  And we have an actual green Green Room!  I personally feel better knowing there’s a fresh coat of paint on just about every surface.

We’ll finish up paint on Tuesday (I call dibs on the kitchen cabinets!), and then cut and lay the new (gently used actually) carpet and new tile for the entryway on Saturday (thank you so much Kim!)

Please be sure to check out the pics!  More to come on Wednesday!

Katie