Weekly Article

As Property Manager, I am proud to partner with Derry Church’s team of great volunteers that work with me and other staff to continually improve and maintain the church property and buildings.

Since last year, many projects have been completed and even more have been started:

• Late last fall we completed the dismantling and total rebuild of approximately 150 feet of the stone wall surrounding the cemetery that was leaning and falling apart.
  
• The Session House, built in 1732 as a log cabin meeting place, has been leaning for probably over 100 years, and the bottom log on the north side had rotted. The Building and Grounds committee and others had concerns about it. We hired British Masonry and Restoration, a local specialty contractor, to stabilize the structure. The heavy old brick chimney sitting in the attic was removed and the north wall was lifted to allow the base of the wall to move out approximately nine inches. The bottom rotted log was replaced with an 1800s log beam, and it was supported with limestone slabs. The west wall had supports added and was re-sided with aged barn siding. This will protect the future of this historic structure for a hundred years or more.
  
• The second phase of the spouting and gutter guard project has been completed with only one more phase to complete the entire building.
  
• I have worked closely with other committees on projects like upgrading all the signs outside the building and adding the Zoom Room to room 7. With that project we also moved the large screen to Fellowship Hall to make presentation setups much easier in that space.
  
• The building known to most of us as the Scout House at the rear of the property needed maintenance and repair. We contracted to have a portion of the stone basement wall repaired that was near falling apart, then we had all the wood siding repaired and the exterior painted. Now the building has many more decades of life ahead.

We are always looking at short- and long-term needs and planning the best fix for the problem.  A few current projects include the improvement of rainwater drainage in front of the Chapel and the whole rear of the building: that will happen this fall. A contractor is set to repair the inside of the Chapel bell tower and add a safe stair/ladder for future inspection and maintenance of the bell.

We are also adding and improving the lighting in the atrium library to make this a more welcoming reading area. 

Next week rooms 4 and 5 will be opened up into one large room as requested by Christian Education. Contractors will move the folding wall from 7AB into rooms 4 and 5 to allow flexible use of that space. The space where the dividing wall was stored in 7AB will become a storage closet.