Property Matters
Generally unseen, our Property team of staff and volunteers look after our buildings. Property Steward Peter Black fills us in on recent activities:
When I am asked how big is the church that we look after, I find it difficult to give a clear answer, so my stock answer is that we have 15 toilets in three buildings and leave them to visualise what that might look like. Our responsibility is to present the whole of our property in a way that is clean and comfortable to all. The building is in use from 9am to 10pm most days of the week.
I hope that most of the time you are unaware of the work that we do. However when you see a hose pipe dangling from a roof or a bucket on a table in Wesleys, we do become a bit more obvious!
We are currently trying to find out where water is leaking into both the south transept of the Church and Wesleys. John Mannington heads up the team and looks after our repairs and maintenance. His patience has led us to a Wesleys solution costing in the hundreds whereas we strongly anticipated re-roofing, costing in the many thousands of pounds - so let's hope that it works.
Since I took on this responsibility I have already spent over £60k on three projects aimed at keeping water out of the building. It is nearly 100 years old and needs a lot of care - so thank you for all that you contribute towards these costs.
Our Operations Assistants, George and Sally, split the evenings between them and look after the cleaning of all the buildings and keep an eye on security whilst providing a friendly link with our many users.
We take on large tasks: apart from the Hall and Church, all the internal painting has been done by the team. We PAT test all our portable electrical assets to ensure that they are safe, polish floors and clean carpets.
Regular tasks are the testing of all the alarm points and the fire alarm system as a whole and keeping an eye on emergency lighting. We like the building warm in winter but no-one likes to pay the bill, so we assess usage of individual rooms and programme the heating system accordingly to keep the bills down.
Spiders, ants, light bulbs, weeds, broken chairs, faulty toasters, bunged-up coffee percolators, banners need hanging up, cobwebs need taking down, chairs out, parcels in, parking for cars, vans, wedding cars, hearses (cones have to be out by 6am!), a broken glass bottle of hand lotion spread all over the pavement outside the front doors. Welcome to High Street!
Peter Black
Property Steward
Peter and some of the Property Team