Bear Hill Church, Hollis C.1840

This projects concerns the work we did on the Bear Hill Baptist Church in Hollis, ME. This building is a true time capsule, it has been vancant for many years and before that only had once a year services for much of the 20th century. We were tasked by the preservation group who is overseeing the restoration to replace nearly three sides of the lower sills and reapply all the carpentry that comes with it. We went first to doing a typical lifting rig where we took just enough weight to take the old sill out and get a new one in. We used all traditional timber framing practices in the process. We then re-chinked and mortared the sill to the granite capstones using a traditional lime mortar. Then finished it off with our typical quartersawn Eastern White Pine clapboard that are skived (overlapping) as was traditionally done on the building. We also identified one main source of the sill rot and that was a window sill that had badly cracked and replaced it.