We’ve known for some time that the exterior doors of Saint Joseph Church needed renewal.  When the parish finance council gave them our attention, we learned how limited our options were.  Everyone’s first thought was to refinish the doors.  However, we discovered that this was not possible, because the oak veneer of the exterior doors had simply disintegrated.  There wasn’t enough wood left to refinish!  Indeed, as we were later to learn, our doors, which we installed in the 1940s, have already been turned inside out as a way of getting more life out of them.  A personal examination of the doors will reveal this.

We looked into the possibility of purchasing new doors: lighter, handicap accessible, more air tight.  We abandoned this direction when the price tag for purchasing and installing five doors topped $150,000. 

Once we decided to paint the doors, the decisions came a bit easier.  No one wanted white, because the doors are always exposed to direct sun and weather.  We didn’t want brown, because we wanted to avoid, as church directives insist, any appearance of the artificial.  We chose our exact shade of green by taking a plate from the roof and having the color matched. 

Surprisingly, the green doors, surrounded by white, do more than match the roof.  They also reproduce the color palette of the church windows as they appear from the outside during the day, green surrounded by white.  The work was done by Alvin Penka and his brothers of Odin.  At the same time, we opted to paint the bannisters at the doors of the church.  These were scraped by hand so as to give the new black finish the longest life possible.  The foot guard plates for the doors have yet to be reinstalled.