Refurbishment Progress

Work is continuing on the church refurbishment, despite coronavirus. For the last three weeks the Limecrete floor has been slowly drying. In the meantime there has been plenty of other work going on.

‘Limescreeding’

Work started this week laying the Limecrete base for the floor. As I wrote previously, Limecrete is a concrete alternative that allows water vapour to escape and not cause damage to the walls.

First Excavations

In order to install the new underfloor heating system the builders have to excavate to around half a meter or so of earth from the floor and then put in a new “Limecrete” base.

Pipes

A slightly eventful week. We held “Little Fishes”, our group for parents, babies, and toddlers, as usual on Wednesday, and on Thursday morning the heating engineer was on-site to drain down the system, ready for removal of the large bore heating pipes in the chapel.

And so it begins…

After a short delay as the main contractor, Kirk and Bills, finished their previous job, work finally has begun. They lost no time in stripping out the pews and starting to investigate what lies beneath. Here are a few photos.

Ready to start!

This morning we had our men’s breakfast and afterwards finished emptying the chapel, ready for the builders to move in on Wednesday or Thursday this coming week. The chapel looks very bare and empty right now, but will soon become a hive of activity.

Grants from the Beatrice Laing Trust and Rank Foundation

God is clearly blessing this project – especially now we have taken the step of faith of pressing the ‘go’ button. In the last couple of weeks we have been awarded grants of £2500 by the Beatrice Laing Trust and £1000 from the Rank Foundation Pebble Grant scheme. We are deeply grateful to both funders for their generous support.

Currently I am in the process of pulling together an application for (regular) planning permission from the local authority for the new boiler flue that is needed. It is slightly complicated by the fact that the building is held in trust, but we’ll get there. At least the listed building consent is already obtained!

Pre-contract Meeting and Another Grant

Let’s start with the grant. We heard this week that we have been awarded a grant for £10,000 by the Garfield Weston Foundation for our refurbishment. This is terrific news and we are hugely grateful. Just over a month ago we took a step of faith and pushed the ‘go’ button on the project. This grant fills the gap, and more than that, I see it as a sign of God’s blessing on this project. We are not doing this in our own strength but in the Lord’s.

Refurbishment is Go!

Tonight at our members’ church meeting we made the momentous decision to move from the fundraising phase on to the next phase – the actual commencement of the refurbishment.