Steve French was bracing for the worst, but was pleasantly surprised the more he worked.
French, who works as a licensed contractor when not busy as Iola’s mayor, was in charge of removing the tin facade over the second-story walls of the Jock’s Nitch building at the intersection of Madison and Jefferson avenues.
The tin had been there for half a century or so, and French was worried what he would find beneath it.
“You just never know what it’s gonna be like,” he said, of the underlying brick’s condition.
French had seen firsthand how messy tin removal can be when he helped pull some storm-damaged tin from the Globe building on the other side of the courthouse square a few years back.
In that case, a recent wind storm had pulled a portion of the tin away from the brick wall, and in so doing, pulled some of the bricks from the wall itself.
“A whole line of bricks had been pulled out and fell back in place,” French said.
The proper repair required use of a masonry restoration company out of Fort Scott, “and it was expensive,” French recalled.
Fast forward to last week, when French began removing the facade — one of the planned improvements to the building announced by owner Phil Minton before Jock’s Nitch opens its doors in November.
Aside from a dozen or so annoyed pigeons nesting in the crevices of the tin covering, the news was good.
As each tin sheet was removed, French found the brick surface largely unaffected.
French suspects the difference between the two buildings was in how the tin was mounted.
The Jock’s Nitch building tin was affixed to metal brackets, while the Globe building tin was mounted on two-by-fours directly affixed to the brick.
The condition of the mortar between the bricks also was a factor, he noted. The Globe building’s mortar had eroded to the point “it was almost like a powder,” French said. “It all had to be cleaned out.”
The mortar in the Jock’s Nitch building is in markedly better condition.
