The front of Odie’s Cafe was not so pretty.  Well…depends on one’s perception of “pretty” of course.  It definitely had a  true historic look…

Slide Show: The Old Facade

The front construction consists of a wooden frame with brick patterned metal sheeting with single paned wooden windows at the top  and cedar wood siding with aluminum windows at the bottom part. The door on the left, leading to the staircase is ancient.   The other door is just plain and well used. The front part of the wall on the parking lot side is locally manufactured clay brick and the back modern cement building blocks.  From the looks of it, this building had not been maintained for many years.

When we bought this place in May 2008, we knew there was a lot of work to do.  The inside needed even more attention then the outside.  We lived in Floyd (near VA Tech in Blacksburg), and we only traveled to Blackstone a few days a month.  We gave ourselves a time frame of  two years to finish the structure of the building.  As Mark’s needs to come down here for work were increasing, we decided to look for a small farm closer to Blackstone to move to with all our livestock and pets.  We have done that and are finally settled.  The Winter of 2009 has been hefty and it slowed us down a lot on the farm.  Also with freezing weather, we cannot work with cement or paint, so we decided to work more on planning.  It gave us some time to design the menu and details of Odie’s Cafe.  Mark started the project on getting our blogs up and running.  We’ll try to work on them regularly to keep you up to date.

To get back to the facade, if you looked at the slide show, you can see how much work needs to be done.  We started a few months ago with sandblasting the old paint off the wood and metal beams.  It was amazing to see what was hiding under it.  See the next post (Sand Blasting Facade) with more details on that.  We have some awesome plans for the parking lot wall.  We’ll leave that to be a surprise for a little later.