TEMPORARY LOCATIONBeginning Oct. 25, the Dade County Public Library will be located at 2058 S. Main Street in Trenton, Ga., for about two weeks.
The Dade County Public Library is boxing its books and moving, then moving again.
The current building on Court Street will close its doors Oct. 11 and then reopen two weeks later at the former CVS store next to Ingles on Main Street. While the library is in CVS, crews will renovate the library building.
A plan has been drafted and bids from contractors are due back on Sept. 9, but there is no set time frame for the renovations to be completed and the library moved back to its original location.
"They can't possibly move all of this stuff," incredulous patron Val Netherly said when told of the move.
Library staff already have begun consolidating shelves and boxing up what they can.
The renovation could cost $850,000 and will expand the building from 8,000 square feet to 12,000. Some of the added space will be for computers and a genealogy resources.
"We're going from a genealogy closet to an actual family genealogy room," said Lecia Eubanks, director of North Georgia's Cherokee Regional Library System, which administrates the Dade library.
Jack Killian, architect for the project, said the changes will add space and "pizzazz" to the building, particularly with a young adult computer area.
"Right now it's a corner of a room, but in the new plan it's a room," he said of the computer lab.
Eubanks said $676,000 is coming from the state to be combined with $50,000 from Dade County and $30,000 from Trenton. The library also hopes to receive a $100,000 federal grant, he said.
Eubanks said due dates on books, DVDs and other media will be reset so none are due during the downtime.
Netherly, 90, reads seven or eight books between her weekly visits and said people often overlook the library. She has seen the library evolve from a table of books in the corner of a hardware store when she was younger and said it has been inconvenient every time it has moved.
"I hate for it to be torn up all of the time," she said.
Her daughter-in-law Carolyn Netherly said the closure will be worth it.
"She'll really like it when it's done," the younger Netherly said.