My kids are well trained. Not to pick their clothes up off the floor or wash their dirty dishes, mind you, but after 13 years of taking iDigHardware readers along on vacation, they are very responsive when I ask them to help me find a door to share here. I can’t even name all of the places we have visited since it all began with Chip Falcon’s Road Trip in 2009. I couldn’t leave iDigHardware unattended, so I drove thousands of miles (Massachusetts to Florida and back) with 3 kids and a Falcon panic device in the car, blogging along the way.
This week I am in Massachusetts, and my family came along to attend a wedding before I head out to teach some code classes. Yesterday morning we were walking to the coffee shop and I mentioned that I was looking for doors to post on iDigHardware. Their first suggestion was an exterior door with a key box, which allows firefighters access to a building if needed. I think it could be beneficial for these boxes to be accessible by law enforcement as well, and I wrote about this a few years ago.
The kids’ next suggestion was to check out the First Church in Plymouth, which they had just heard about at the Visitors Center in town.
The arches and columns surrounding the entrance are beautifully detailed:
The doors and the glass transom are also gorgeous:
But wait – are those ring pulls upside down? Is this door opening the earliest known candidate for Fixed-it Friday?
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I am going to take crack at it and say the rings can be locked in the recess in the way it is currently installed, however, it is mounted this way for safety to keep people’s fingers from being squeezed.
Safe knuckles.
Hmmm… I think you’re right! Someone’s got a keen eye!
Good catch!!!
Nice catch, those pull handles are definitely upside down. I can’t imagine how difficult and expensive it would be to correct since they look like they’ve been on for a long time.
Or perhaps the doors were installed upside down? LOL
Or were the doors hung upside-down.
One door would be considered upside down, the other probably not. The crosses on the appliqués are pointing up like they are supposed to on the left door and pointing down on the right door. The easiest way to fix “might” be to flip both doors and turn over the correct appliqués. Most likely some restoration company did not pay attention to details at some point. I highly doubt that the original craftsmen would have made 2 obvious mistakes especially since the ironwork was probably made and installed by the same person.
While I doubt this is the case, it’s not uncommon for the craftsmen involved in old churches to intentionally include a mistake so as not to show perfection that would be reserved for only God to accomplish.
Usually this occurs in one piece of stone work reversed, or an intentionally reversed scroll in a repeating piece of wooden scrollwork.
My guess here is that a restoration company rehung the doors upside down after refinishing or after rebuilding them with the original ironwork, and those pulls were originally mounted higher than a “modern” sensibility (or code) insisted upon.