GLASGOW — While three teen-age girls used a crowbar to demolish old metal lockers in a dressing room located off the gym, two men laid tile in a second floor restroom Wednesday.

At the same time, in the kitchen, a group of women were busy making chicken and dumplings to serve to the group of about 50 volunteers with the Winston Baptist Association who have spent the week helping to renovate the Liberty District-Ralph Bunche Community Center.

The volunteers hail from all across Alabama

“We’re remodeling some bathrooms; putting tile down. We’re also sheetrocking overhead. We’re tearing out bleachers and building walls and in general just whatever needs to be done,” said Al Hood, director of missions for the group.

WBA is working with Brother Mike Montgomery, associate pastor of Loving Springs Baptist Church, on the project.

Montgomery had worked with the group on other projects in the past and knew what work they were capable of doing.

“They had a lot of different skill sets and this building needed everyone of them,” Montgomery said.

The group has removed the bleachers in the center’s gym, in addition to making restrooms handicap accessible, building a wall to separate the gym from the entrance to the Boys and Girls Club of Glasgow-Barren County and replacing sheetrock in several rooms on the second floor that had sustained water damage.

“They are just giving our building an over-all makeover,” Montgomery said.

The bleachers in the gym were original to the structure; having been in place since 1955.

“They were wooden and they had some termite damage, so we have taken them out,” said Hood.

The wooden bleachers will be replaced with aluminum bleachers that can be moved around the gym, he said.

The WBA volunteers began their work around 6:30 a.m. Monday.

“We will be here until Friday afternoon. We’ll knock off at about 4 o’clock,” Hood said.

The WBA takes on a construction or renovation project each July.

“Normally, when we go in it’s a new construction and we just do sheetrock,” Hood said.

In 2009, WBA built a 1,400 to 1,500 square foot house for a paraplegic in about two days.

“The interesting thing about this group is this man is the only man up until this year that is actually employed by the construction industry,” Hood said of Kerry Vaughn, who is the group’s construction manager. “The rest of us are employed as teachers, mechanics, forestry workers, you name it.”

The reason they choose July as the month to take on such projects is because so many of the volunteers are teachers or do some type of work for school systems, he said.

Attendance this year is down compared to previous years.

“Last year we had 111, but our area was devastated by the tornadoes on April 27 so we lost a lot of folks because of that,” Hood said.

Winson County, Ala. is located an hour and-a-half from Tuscaloosa, which was hit hard by a mile-wide tornado in late April. Only the northwestern portion of Winston County sustained damage from the April storms.

“We had 47 structures that were damaged. God blessed us. Our area, we lost a few trees and stuff like that, but all the counties around us were hit,” Hood said.

WBA has been helping with the tornado relief projects.

“We are going back the first week of August and we will be helping with a Habitat for Humanity home. Part of our group will be working with that,” Hood said. “Our association also has a disaster relief laundry trailer and we’ve been deployed three times for a total almost — from April 30 until May 10 we were deployed in three different places across the state of Alabama.”

One volunteer who could not make the trip to Glasgow lost his daughter and son-in-law in a tornado, leaving behind their 2-year-old child.

“So they are not with us this week on account of that,” Hood said.

When WBA volunteers are not busy working on the renovation project, they are hosting the vacation bible school at Loving Springs Baptist Church, which is where Montgomery serves as associated pastor.

Renovation of the community center began around the first of the year with the rewiring of the building and the replacement of its heating and cooling system.

The work WBA is doing this week will not complete the renovation of the community center. More is to be done by another group of volunteers from Mississippi, who are expected to arrive in a couple of weeks, Montgomery said.

Other volunteer groups are expected to continue the project throughout the summer, he said.

Montgomery hopes other churches in the area will work the volunteer groups that are expected to arrive later in holding bible schools.