Church Refurbishment

It all seems a long time ago now but some six to seven years ago the Church Council at Box decided that we really had to improve our Church building and provide facilities that were fit for the 21^st century rather than looking as though we were still in the 19^th century. We had two buildings connected by a side entrance porch. The decision was taken to sell the school building where we had a kitchen, toilet, storage facilities, and a cosy well-furnished room on the ground floor and a large hall on the first floor. Most of this building was in a poor state of repair and would have needed considerable money spent on it to bring it up to a good standard. The money from the sale, together with further money that we needed to raise would allow us to update the Church building and provide a multi-functional worship area.

In the Church itself we now have our multi-purpose worship centre which is much more suitable for modern worship and which, at the same time, is able to accommodate many different village organisations.

This is briefly the story of that refurbishment.

The first question was who was to design the refurbished building. We heard of a firm specialising in the refurbishment of Methodist Churches. This firm designed, refurbished and project managed the whole scheme. This of course is unusual and we were wary of giving every aspect of the job to just one firm and not having one contractor at least ‘on our side’. We spoke with the principals of the firm and looked at other work they had done. The principals were themselves Methodists and had started the firm after being asked by their own Church to manage some improvement work there. We were convinced and (eventually) so was the Circuit and Methodist HQ. The contract was signed.

The pews came out a few months before the actual building work started and we used the bare Church without pews for that time. (see photo across). We are a small congregation (pictured below at the last Service before the work began) and to undertake such a large project was daunting and required us to take a large step of faith
			The work was going to take four months but then asbestos was found under the floorboards and this had to be removed before we went any further. This resulted in extra time and extra cost, but the work had to be done. The organ was moved from the front of the Church to the back and put up into a newly created space at first floor level . See photos below. A new kitchen, toilets and baby changing area were built and a new cross installed where the organ used to be forming a new focus for worship.

Although the work wasn’t finished we managed to get the Church looking just as it should for our Church Anniversary Service on 13^th October 2002 (photo across). Our contractors really pulled out the stops to make sure we could have this important service in our own Church. Only a fortnight before we were all wondering how they would do it. Most of the money for the refurbishment came from selling our old school premises, but people from all over the country have been generous in giving us grants and loans to enable the work to be done.

The last picture shows the Church and organ (and organist) as it is now. There are still things we would like to do to improve the facilities even more, but these will wait until we have cleared our debts and get back on an even keel. We have our new Church building fit for worshipping God. Now comes the difficult bit as we use the newly refurbished building as a centre for outreach in our community. We have some exciting plans. Please come back and see what we are doing. We would be delighted to see you at any of our Services or mid-week activities.