Thank Goodness It's Friday

Of course, work will continue over the weekend in our frantic effort to get open again. Still, it's nice to have the week over.

Library Staff is back at work again. This morning they cleaned and arranged the shelves in the Fiction and Nonfiction Sections. The carpeting is laid, but the baseboards still need to be put up. For reasons that totally escape us, the work crew will not put up the baseboards until they finish all the carpeting. That means we can't put bookcases against the wall. Our Staff will start replacing books, but it's very difficult when you don't have all the shelves in place. Just typical of this whole experience.

The whole idea was to carpet one section at a time. We would pack up and clean out a section, and the work crew would move in and complete it. Then we could go to the completed section and put it back together. Of course, we completed packing up the entire Library before the crew even finished carpeting the first section. Now that we've found out the baseboards won't be in until the end, it sort of messes up the whole system even further.

There is one part of this project that has been great. The Mississippi Library Commission has sent three consultants on Library design and layout to work with us during this process, and they have been great. Not only did they do our layout, but they have helped us with all the dirty work as well. Plus, they're just a lot of fun to be around.

And the Library Staff have been real troopers. Although they enjoyed the unexpected two days off, it also means they'll be working over the weekend. When we finally open again, you may find the Staff is a little bleary eyed and suffering from multiple muscle aches and pains.

Here is a slideshow of the pictures from today. Click on any picture to go to the online album with captions. (If you're reading this on Facebook, you'll have to go to the original blog to see the pictures.)