PULASKI (NBC 26) — A Pulaski hair salon rises from the rubble of a fire and re-opens for business. Just a few months after A Kut Above salon burned down, it is open again and taking appointments. One woman managed to bring beauty out of the rubble.
"I wanted boujee, and I got boujee," Dawn Tooley-Sinnaeve said outside the new location of her business Friday afternoon.
NBC 26 first introduced you to Tooley-Sinnaeve the day a fire destroyed her hair salon and another business in Pulaski on Sept. 14.
Even then, she said her business would be back.
"I wanted to reopen most definitely," she said after the ribbon cutting at her business' new location. "I wanted to be in this community. I didn't want to be somewhere else ... To think of not being out here wouldn't have been acceptable."
On Friday, more than three months later, she made that goal a reality. From 3 to 6 p.m. friends, family, and community members gathered to celebrate the opening of the salon's new location.
Tooley-Sinnaeve said she wanted a different vibe in this salon compared to the rustic feel of the one that burned down.
"I don't want to be reminded every day looking at it of what I did lose," she said. As for the new salon; "It's pretty, it's beautiful, it's sparkly and that's my personality."
She said a printed image of girls sitting under hair dryers and her brush rollers were two of the only things to survive the fire. Those items and a photo of a rainbow outside her old building, while the firefighters were working, are staying put in the new salon. As are her previous employees, who she said are all joining her at the new location.
She says she couldn't have done this without her family.
"We just were here when she needed," her daughter Cayla Vanlangendon said. "Whether it was two in the morning and she couldn't sleep and needed to call and talk and vent, we were there."
"Without that, I wouldn't have been here at this point," Tooley-Sinnaeve said.
A Kut Above is located at 238 West Pulaski Street.
