Narthex Door Restoration

Blind Eye Restoration was hired by First Congregational Church of Columbus Ohio in 2023 to begin work on their basement stained glass steel windows and their narthex door and transom. The windows were finished first, followed by the transom and the door being completed in 2024. The church had already previously commissioned a stained glass panel, named the Social Justice window, to replace the original glass, and needed the transom framework custom modified to fit both protective glazing, and the layered stained glass window panels, with a pathway for air movement between that did not irreperably alter the historic frame design. To do that, the team dissassembled all the exterior tracery for restoration and repair and created a custom sill support before putting back the tracery with spacing for the original interior trim details to remain.

The doors themselves were fully removed and taken back to the shop for refinishing and repairs. The interior wood push panels were damaged from years of hardware replacement, and so were removed and remade larger to better fit the proportion of new custom interior push plates made by BER to match the design of historic push plates found elsewhere in the church. Damaged and cracked trim was replaced, and the entire door was stripped to bare wood to remove a past application of polyurethane sealer that had failed. The doors were reinstalled with new door bumper hardware, restored closers, and the BER team even custom cut and infilled channels through the plaster walls and door trim to hide new security lock wiring so that the doors could function on the church's remote locking system and make use of a push button activator.