The first phase of the Ol’ Moose Hall facelift is almost complete. Innisfail Town Theatre group members suspect the brick outlay on the front of the building should be complete sometime this month.
“It’s been a whole lot of volunteers putting in all their sunny summer weekends and it’s been great to have,” said member Greg Bennett, who designed the new look for the building.
The group received $22,000 in provincial funding over the summer, an amount they had to match through some of their own funds and through volunteer hours.
Bennett said designing the new look was easy.
“Money-wise we couldn’t afford to do the entire thing at once,” he explained. “We hummed and hawed for awhile how we’re going to do it. Ron (Kooy, member) got us a really good deal with bricks and things just started to fall into place. I do a little bit of design work on my computer. And I already had a 3-D model of the hall on the computer so it was just a matter of slapping a few different things on it to see what looks good,” he said.
The final design has brick inside the front entrance and down along the bottom of the entire building. The siding will be replaced, in a separate phase.
The group also had the three front windows opened up to the street. Before they had been covered over.
“Under the siding there’s stucco in some places, cedar siding, tin, some bricks,” he said of the layers they’ve discovered.
The group purchased the Ol’ Moose Hall in 2005 and since then has taken steps to renovate the interior and exterior to preserve the history, explained member Ron Kooy.
The building has served as an opera house, armoury, movie theatre and dance hall and is over 100 years old.
The second phase will begin next summer, pending funding.
