Baccarat Candlestick Disassembled
June 24, 2009
Read House exterior preservation will soon be underway! At our Monday construction meeting, the project superintendent from our construction management firm projected that scaffolding will be erected beginning the week of July 13. In the meantime, the project will be put out to bid to various trades.
Although the Read House will remain open during the preservation project, we will be taking every precaution to protect our museum collections from the common construction threats of unintended contact, dust, and vibrations. Collections manager Jennifer Potts and Read House curatorial assistants have spent the last two weeks packing the most fragile parts of our collections, including porcelain, crystal, and delicate paper, for safe storage in our Wilmington collections facility. Other items, such as three family portraits and one landscape painting, will be removed immediately before construction begins.
One of the most extensive segments of the preservation project will be window restoration and repair. Window sashes will be removed, repaired in a carpentry shop, and then replaced. This process will require further rearrangement of collections pieces that will remain on site and periodic room closures. I will try to post pictures of the process because I am sure many of you are curious about what happens behind closed doors and what precautions we and our construction managers will be taking to ensure the safety of our collections.
More to come…
Michele
