MANY of you have been asking if we are making any more improvements to the former Barony St John hall building and also how our plans for a café extension are going, so I thought I had better update you.

As you may remember, we took over the Barony buildings back in December 2014. Since then, we have spent over £200,000 renovating the place.

To allow us to open, we renovated the toilets and replaced the leaking skylight windows and in 2017, we completely renovated the Training Room or ‘little hall’ as it was known in its church days. This included replacing all the windows, the floor, the ceiling and the plaster walls, as well as the electrics.

In 2018, we replaced the kitchen area, building in extra storage space and cupboards. And in 2019, we replaced the main hall’s large circular window as it was letting in wind and water.

In 2020, we started our biggest renovation job – the main hall. The ceiling and walls were re-plastered, the floorboards and joists partially replaced, and all the windows were replaced. Additionally, we replaced all the electrics and radiators. In the corridor, we took up the entire floor and started again to make it even and insulated and we replaced the heating system for the entire building.

Most recently, last month we made some minor repairs to the main hall ceiling and renovated the Office room of the Centre, which was the former Vestry.

We’ve added storage shelves in the Office, taken out the desk to make some more room and hopefully, within the next few weeks, we can get it looking a bit more like an office area again rather than a dumping ground. We also replaced all the old electrics in the building including the electric switchboards.

We have been making plans to demolish the existing lean-to building in our courtyard since 2020. This was the old Nursery room during the building’s church years but now it is damp and is covered in woodworm as well as both wet and dry rot.

Our plans are to have a café building running from the corridor door in the courtyard, all the way to the front of the hall building.

Having received Planning permission, we have made a few alterations to the plans to try to become more cost effective. This is because our original plans came in at £95,000 to build but with Brexit and the increased cost of bringing building materials into this country, this has now shot up to £140,000. The result, is that we need to raise some more capital to allow us to start building the café.

When completed, it will be a place to not only have a coffee but to come to improve your mental wellbeing. There will be games, quizzes, and fun events to make you laugh and smile. We will have mindfulness and meditation sessions to improve your mental health too. And hopefully, it will be a place where people can meet, make friends and have a chat.

If you know of any funding we can apply for to make our café plans come true, please let us know. In the meantime, please visit our website www.ScotCPS.org.uk to learn more about our charity and the work we do to help vulnerable people.