A thing of beauty

Over the last 10 days we have started work on refurbishing some of the shutters. All of them are covered with some very old and very hard paint which is almost certainly lead based. I found a great place that will sand blast all of this stuff off and return the shutters to bare wood. We have the first ones back now and it turns out that they are very old oak! We are in the process of repairing them and refurbing the hinges etc. In the next few days we will be ready to re hang some of them so watch this space.

In the meantime though we also removed the old door from the square tower at the from of the building - see top left photo. I also wanted to get this refurbed before heading back to Austria. Getting it out was a little tricky as it was locked and we did not have a key. But eventually we succeeded and sent it off to the sand blasters. Well yesterday I collected it from them, I was planning to paint it and re hang it however now I have seen it there is no way that it is being painted. It is

amazing, solid oak, beautifully carved and very old. It has come up almost like new so we will just sand it to a nice smooth finish and then wax & oil it. Also I will remove the metalwork panels and repaint these in black before replacing them. It is going to look so good when it is completed. The quality of the craftsmanship is first rate as is the detailing on it. It has been repaired on the back at some point as you can see from the metal reinforcing but this is not a problem, it is part of the history of this beautiful door.