Business Briefs, Hardwick

Clip Joint, Nikki the Barber Reopen

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The Clip Joint & Co. and Nikki the Barber reopened at 9 South Main Street in Hardwick, Thursday, Jan. 30 after being closed since November 18, 2024 for remediation of an oil spill. Further work is being done before the upstairs apartments can be reoccupied. courtesy photo

HARDWICK – The Clip Joint & Co. salon at 9 South Main Street reopened Thursday morning, January 30, with limited space. Clip Joint staff was back at work and Nikki the Barber had moved her chair into the main salon space with them to continue serving her customers.

A temporary wall now blocks off the former entrance and the space Nikki and the Clip Joint check-in stand shared. That area is where oil and its fumes from a November leak in the boiler room upstairs created an unsafe space, causing the business and residents upstairs to be evacuated from the building.

Eleven weeks later that temporary wall now blocks off the unsafe space and the Clip Joint has a separate hot water tank and heating while a permanent solution is in the works.

Tracy Annis found out on Tuesday that they’d be able to reoccupy the space on Thursday, just two days before reopening. “Smaller space, same hours,” she said.

Nicole Phelps, Nikki the Barber, said she’d moved all of her equipment to her home while the building was closed. She brought her chair and other things back Wednesday night, and went home for supper, intending to come back and finish in the evening. She decided to take the evening off, returning at 6:30 Thursday morning to set everything up before taking her first customer.

The rest of the building is still unheated and residents who occupied upstairs apartments have been relocated.

Patrick Shattuck, executive director of the building’s current management company Rural Edge, says a plan has been developed for resolving a problem that kept getting bigger as cleaning attempts progressed. “A portion of the structural support beam was determined to not be able to be cleaned,” he said. The beam would have to be removed. “This required bringing in the structural engineer to determine the strategy for supporting the resulting load.”

Shattuck said they got the plans from the engineer the last week of January. “. . . We have been given the go-ahead from the insurance inspectors to remove the boilers from the second floor so that the flooring in the second floor mechanical room and hall can be removed.

“The boilers come out on February 10 and hopefully the rest of the remediation work quickly follows,” said Shattuck. “We are also in the process of installing an under slab ventilation system to address any lingering fumes.”

Annis Celebrated 30 years in business on April 24, 2024. “Tracy first opened her doors on this day in 1994 on Wolcott Street as Tracy’s Clip Joint,” said a social media post that day. Years later the shop moved to its current location on South Main Street where it became The Clip Joint & Co.” Little did Annis know then, the building would be closed July 11 because floodwaters entered the building, then again on November 18 for 11 weeks.

If all goes well, the shop will remain open as repairs happen in the rest of the building, she said

Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.

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Paul Fixx

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