Good Bye Old Club House

With  plans all drawn up for the brand new ILBC club house, the old place had to come down to make way for the new. Good bye "little house on the prairie"! It was a great old building, with many charms, but it was only built on skids, back in 1936, on land donated by the Cross Family. The original building may have been an old army barracks, like the Ramsay Community Hall, with 5 separate sections added on over the years and jimmy-rigged to fit together.
As the volunteer maintenance man, I've crawled underneath the building more than a few times, to fix broken pipes and various other things, since the building was not heated and sometimes suffered through the winters, with shifting, sagging, and eroding. Who knows what sort of critters lived and died under there and it certainly made for a creepy experience, laying on one's back to fix something and turning your head to come face to face with a mummified squirrel head! haha.
We've been raising funds for the past 6 or 7 years and finally have enough cash in the kitty to proceed with construction of the new club house. Watch for further posts on the new building and what she will look like when done.
We saved some of the historical features of the building to use in our "heritage wall" and then had a fair bit of salvage done on the building by Reclaimed Trading Company, with the final demolition done with the machinery pictured below. Once the foundation and footings are in and the yard re-graded, work will begin on the framing.
Everyone is pretty excited and we hope to have full use of the new digs by the start of the 2014 season, more or less. Can't wait!