Friday, April 03, 2009

Finishing Touches

We are working feverishly to have everything ready for Vespers and Divine Liturgy this weekend. This is the "dirty work"... cleaning up the yard debris and tree trimmings from the property. Dale brought his chipper over and some of the Mission folks fed it branches all morning. (For those new to blogs, you can click on the pictures and they will enlarge for more detail).

This is Dale close up. He's an old friend from the ECUSA days who is also the AC contractor for the Mission. He donated a 4,000.00 high efficiency AC unit to us that he removed from a customer's house and refurbished for us. He hadn't seen the building since the first week when he roughed in the duct work. He liked the dome.
We got laminate wood flooring (dirt cheap... again), and this is what several of our Mission members did on their days off this week.

I came in right behind them and started installing the baseboard (found at Habitat for Humanity's thrift store for 20 cents on the dollar). I hate to keep bringing "cheap" up, but for folks who are looking at building a Mission Church, you don't have to have a half million in the bank to do something really nice.
Installing baseboard is like doing all of your Lenten prostrations in one day.
This is the finished baseboard (and corbles by the way).
And now we begin the temporary iconostasis. We bought 4 used doors and 3 closet doors for $ 50.00 at Habitat's thrift store and we're creating panels out of them with 1" x 3" pine boards.
We anchor the doors to the front of the altar raised floor with 4" screws for stability. A closet door is cut and becomes an arch over the deacon's door.

We mirror the assembly on the other side.

And we cut another closet door for the arch over the altar door which will be topped off with a cross and an icon. This is the basic structure. Fr. Damian practices coming out of the doors to see if they are wide enough (no comment...grin!). Tomorrow while our Mission work day moves everything from the house to the Church, I'll add all the "gingerbread" moldings, candle shelves and paint it, the icons go up and we pray Vespers tomorrow night.

And the most important part... clean up. Teri is giving Fr. Damian dust mop lessons. Blue fuzzy side down, Father.

5 comments:

Jessie said...

Amazing!
Wish we were there to witness/ participate :-) Although you have given me the guts to seek donations for our church's summer projects (and badly needed at that).

Glory to God!

Unknown said...

Steve,

It has been a great blessing to follow the progress of your temple.

Any chance that someone could video some of your first service? I'm sure many of your readers would love to see the video. I would.

Steve Robinson said...

Father James,
What a great idea! I'll see if someone has a camera.

Unknown said...

Thanks, Steve. It would be a blessing for all of us to be able to see Fr. Damian open the curtains and proclaim "Blessed Is Our God Always..." for the very first time in your new sanctuary. Maybe you could do the first 10-15 minutes of Vespers (or more would be even better)? Just a thought...

Cha said...

I'd love to see this.