On Wednesday, HBA architects completed the first phase of our remodeling project here at the paper. They did a fantastic job and we were all excited. That is until Thursday morning when it came time to begin moving in.

The crews are going to virtually halt work for a week while we move some 50 years of accumulated news debris out of the front half of our building and set up a daily newspaper operation in the back. It hasn’t been pretty.

Yesterday morning I was here earlier to meet some folks who were going to help us move. By about 10 a.m., the front of the building was nearly empty. Around 11, a lady came in the front. She saw a painter in the back of the building and asked, &uot;Is this still the Suffolk News-Herald?&uot;

The painter motioned to me and I went toward the front.

&uot;No ma’am,&uot; I said, jokingly. &uot;Those folks moved to Portsmouth, I think.&uot;

Her question was certainly understandable. The place was a mess.

About two weeks prior to the move beginning, we held a cleanup day, and nearly filled an entire industrial-sized dumpster with old papers and boxes upon boxes full of even older papers, many of which, no doubt, had not been viewed by human eyes in decades. Our entire team worked hard that day and I’m proud of them.

When work starts this week on phase II of our project, it won’t only be News-Herald employees who will be inconvenienced, but our customers as well.

Our front entrance is going to be locked, allowing access only to HBA’s crew. Anyone wishing to do business with us in person will have to go around to the back of our building to enter. There will be a walkway setup through our former pressroom and mailroom that customers will have to traverse to make it to the new office area, but those who stick the journey out are in for a treat.

While it’s a little cramped – currently housing about 15 more people than it was designed for, our employees and customers for the first time in decades have a first-class office environment in which they can take pride.

One of the casualties of this project has been our Web site. We were scheduled to revamp our site and go to a new host in early June. The new site is suffolknewsherald.townnews.com, and it’s a much livelier site that will allow us to use more photographs among other things.

About a month or so before suffolknewsherald.townnews.com was go live, we began experiencing some difficulty with the old site, suffolknewsherald.com. We were only able to update it sporadically during that period, on days when we were lucky enough to be able to access it.

Suffolknewsherald.com is no longer a valid site. All our news is now being uploaded to the new site and classified ads should start appearing within the week.

We apologize for any frustration and inconvenience for everything connected with the renovation and ask that you please bear with us.

We’re not moving. We’re here to stay.

Andy Prutsok is editor and publisher of the News-Herald.