Music Folk Store Remodel -- May, 2003

After months of discussions and planning, we decided in March to give the store a major facelift. Our concept for the store was to emulate a 1920's era Webster Groves home. We knew we had a tin ceiling in the west room that could be refurbished. We also knew that by adding a few fine touches along the way, we could accomplish the goal. We wanted to do as much of the work ourselves as possible, but knew we'd need help with some of the bigger items.

We contracted with Michael Bohn of Traditional Stair and Woodworking to remodel the office and the western most room of the store, but we had a few things to do before we could begin. First, we had to rework a portion of our warehouse to accomodate the repair shop. Next, we had to remodel the old shop space to become our new office. Michael arrived in early April to begin remodeling the old shop space. In early May, we moved the office from the east room to the fresh, new space Michael reclaimed for us.

For the following two weeks, Michael began preparations for the major project in the west room. In the meantime, we planned out our efforts in the east room. On May 16, we closed for 10 days to remodel the store. Here's what happened next.

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Somewhere early in the process, this gremlin was painted on one of our old windows. Thankfully, this was the only real gremlin we saw through the whole process.

By the way, no one took responsibility for the gremlin. Supernatural? You be the judge.

As Michael began to prepare for the big show, we closed off a small section of the store. The plywood wall at the back of the west room gave Michael extra space to see what was behind the paneling, under the carpet, and above the drop ceiling.

The time invested in this "exploratory surgery" saved us a ton of time once we started on May 16. Simply knowing how to remove the drop ceiling efficiently saved us a day of labor.
While Michael was working behind the scenes on the west side, the Music Folk staff was beginning to move on the east room. We contracted with Wilke Windows to replace the old single pane windows on the back of the store. Their work was very good and the noise these windows cut for us was a real boon.

For those of you who haven't visited us, we're in an old building. We've got real plaster walls and as we began the remodel we found that fact was one of our bigger challenges.

As you can see at left, we had to do a ton of patching where walls came down or the mortar had been compromised. This is from our old office space.
This is another shot of the office after we removed one of the walls.
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Music Folk Celebrates 30 Years
As part of a year long celebration of our 30th anniversary, Andy & Don decided to give the store a major facelift. These pictures are a brief look at what we did.

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