Walter arrives at the salle to find Doc already there. He is talking to the current tenants about buying some of their old furniture.

Feeling cocky, we decide to rely on community donations and dumpster diving for all our furnishings.

Left, Doc works on the bottle of Champagne.

In a promising feat of manipulation, which bodes well for the days ahead, Doc manages to get the cork out of the champagne.

We pour a libation on the ground, for our peeps. And we toast the coming salle.

Left, Doc during the champagne walk-through.

This is the view coming into the salle. The building is 60x60 feet, enough for 8 competition-length fencing strips.

However, a large percentage of the interior is honeycombed with offices. These offices have to go.

The demolition permit is put in, and we start day 1 of renovations.

After about 6 combined hours, Doc and Walter have made 1% progress. It wasn't the champagne. We can't remove the outside walls until we remove the inside walls. We can't remove the inside walls until we remove the molding and the suspended ceiling tiles. We can't remove the molding until we drag around some furniture that hasn't been moved out yet.

We congratulate ourselves that, while only one piece of wood has been removed and 20 screws, we at least know what we need to do.

Day 2

Walter and Doc, working alone, because Walter still hasn't told anybody that the salle is open for renovations.

Kevin, as it turns out, was just a few blocks away, waiting to come help.

The pile in the back is insulation, removed by Doc from the ceilings. The doors and door-frames are Walter's specialty.

The view of the offices, from the open part of the building. The interior is highly finished (molding, ceiling panels, lights, wires, carpets), but the outside looks thrown-together.

Here is photographic evidence of work: One piece of plywood removed, and the narrow door removed.

Since we could get to it, the suspended ceiling is removed in the Northwest office. This is the first office that will be deconstructed.

That filing cabinet is a fire safe — 1 ton of immobile bliss, a car would bounce off it. So we have to work around it. Actually, there are two of them in the office.

One of the hallways now shows evidence of carpet and paneling removal.

We like the panels the best — they just pop off the walls, with little resistance. We never know what the panels will reveal. The interior has obviously been renovated several times. In the picture to the left, you can see that there used to be a stairway in the hall.

No renovations, because it's a fencing night. We let all the Ole Miss fencers know that salle work is starting, and how they can help

Day 3

Kevin, Vicki and Ryan join our skilled workforce.

With the inside finishing removed (molding, suspended ceiling, panels), we can finally get to the plywood surfacing. It complains, but we get some removed. The ribs of the construction are now visible.

In the background are the piles of material. We're saving everything, because of the shoestring budget. On Friday, we lost only one piece of molding, when Walter got impatient.

Doc removes the paneling. The Northwest office (one of 4 offices) was the first to be vivisected.

Ryan here removes a whiteboard from the back of the construction. The lighting is variable.

In the foreground is an unknown and elusive figure.

Kevin removes the metal bracket for the suspended ceiling.

The brackets are attached in different manners, based on which room you're in. Nails, deck screws, bolt screws. For every method, it was very trying to remove the brackets.

Vicki pulled up all the carpet from the front offices.

Here she is moving some electrolyte cannisters to the tenant's pile of stuff.

Ryan handled the electrics in the Northwest office.

In the background is Kevin. This is one of two windows near the front of the building, where people in the offices could look out into the floorspace. It all has to go.

Vicki removing brackets from one of the front offices. In this room, the brackets were attached with nails. We didn't save too many of those brackets — bent beyond recognition.

Kevin assessing the Northwest office. It's starting to look taken-apart… but not very.

The view from the front door.

As renovation progresses, you should see the space opening up. Now, the major diference is that all the carpets are gone.

Day 4

We are starting to remove the walls of the back portion.

These photos were taken as Walter walked out the door (5 hours, net work).

Sean, Brooks, and Brooks' friend had just arrived to take over the load. Doc stayed on — his goal is to get the entire back portion removed today.

In the wee hours of Saturday, Doc and Walter got the Southwest office stripped to the walls. You can see all the way to the back of the building now.

This is part one of three parts to the dismantling. To the left of Doc (on the ladder), is part 2, a big office. To the left of that is a big office, entry foyer, and bathroom.

If we had it all to do over again, we'd be about a day ahead of the game. There's an art to taking buildings apart, and we're slowly learning the skills.

Note the fire-safes, still standing immobile in the office.

Brooks and Sean ease into the renovations by looking up as Doc works.

To the right, out of view, is Brooks' friend toiling thanklessly to remove nails from all the wood.

Doc's renovation schedule: Monday, Wednesday, Friday afternoons. Saturday.

Walter's renovation schedule (Walter has keys): Monday, Wednesday, Friday nights (after 8pm probably). Saturday, and some random times on Sunday. If you're planning to work when Walter is there and not Doc, just drop him an email, so he can be reliable.

Day 5

Short day. Yesterday, all the Ole Miss muscle pulled down the walls to the two northernmost offices. That was the final step for completing phase one.

Sunday morning, early, Doc and Walter both made impulsive pilgrimages to the salle, and ran into each other. We are coach material.

After the walls fell, the nails had to be taken out, and the wood stacked.

One piece of wood can have big fat nails, screws, staples, finishing nails, and molding staple-nails. Each of these requires its own tool. Doc and Walter worked three hours, switching between crowbars, hammers, pliers, and screwsdrivers.

In the middle board in the foreground, there were forty-four nails.

This was pretty exhausting, and we wished someone else was doing the work, while we were bossing them. We started making silly mistakes — like hammering boards while our feet were under them.

To the left is the pile of finished, clean lumber.

At the beginning of the morning we were careful and deliberate. By the end of the morning, we were just beating on the boards with crowbars.

We will have to go through this three more times. By the end, we will have much more wood than we need. We plan to use the extra to make benches, fencing targets, a storage shed, &etc.

Left, just a few planks left to redeem… they will wait for another day.

Some of the thirty pounds of nails we removed.

As we cleaned the boards, the floor grew slick with nails. When we put a board on the ground, it would have more nails stuck in it when we picked it up again. We broomed them against the walls.