All Saints Episcopal originally asked us to only repair their steeple, as they had some missing slates and the wooden dormers were rotten and needed some paint. Once inside the steeple, we discovered that the slates were glued down and to each other, making them impossible to replace. Adding insult to injury, untreated, long-term leaks had caused some of the wood to rot.
To proceed as safely as possible, we brought out an engineer, because we had doubts about building scaffold on top of the chapel. Sure enough, we couldn't. We had to close the street down and bring in 75' steel I-beams and span across the chapel so that we could erect scaffold safely around the steeple.
Once the scaffolding was up, we removed the roof and dried it in. We replaced all the rotten wood. We restored all the damaged masonry elements - we used lime mortar to tuckpoint the joints, and historic stone patch to repair the damaged stones. We then installed a new North Country Black Slate roof with all new copper flashings.
