Wooden seat restoration in Frauenkirche church

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Wooden seat restoration in Frauenkirche church

You may think that Osmo colour oils are only useful for use on wood flooring, fact is it can be used in most situations such as skirting, architraves and mouldings. The famous Frauenkirche church in Dresden had it's seats stained with a honey colour Osmo colour oil. Here at real oak floors we can supply some of our wood doors unfinished which means you can finish them with your own choice of colour from our extensive range.

The Frauenkirche in Dresden was built in the years 1726 – 1743. The building was in need of a total rebuild as it was destroyed during the second world war, even the wood flooring was completely destroyed! It has taken many many years to restore the church to it's former glory, in fact well over fifteen years with a sponsored investment of over 100 million euro's. The restoration project needed expert carpenters to bring it back to it's former glory as they were the only ones with the skills needed to do the job and do the job to the standard it needed to be done! In the end over 80 carpenters applied for the job of restoring the church seats. Amongst those that applied was Sebastian Schultz, an experienced carpenter from Chemnitz, Germany. Chemnitz stood out from all the other applicants as he had researched in depth the details of the original furniture. His research had found that regional fur from Saxonia and Bohemia has been used instead of Douglas fir as was specified. As a result of this he and his team sealed the deal and got the contract.

Schultz knew why this fir wood was used for the church seats. It was because the properties of the fir wood were ideally suited to the job. Fir wood is light, making it very easy to bend, has a low resin count and grows very straight. It also has an attenuating affect which reduces resonance.

For the job at hand Schultz and his team processed 400 cubic meters of fir wood which took them a total of three years to process ready for the church.

The rampart totalled 1, 200 square meters and the seats totalled 3, 800 a total of 5, 000 square meters of wood, all of which was hand-planed and finished.

Once the seats were constructed they were treated with products from Osmo. Eighty other samples from different products were tested before this procedure but in the end they settled on the Osmo products. Firstly the seats were stained a honey colour matching that of the original seats and then finished using Osmo Wood Wax. It took 25 cans of the Osmo product each of which contained 25 litres to complete the job a total of 625 litres!

Maintenance wise the seats have only had treatment once in the last two years. Fact is Osmo maintenance products should be used once every three months in high traffic areas such as the church or any other high traffic area such as on an oak flooring installation in the public domain.

The project was a success with the wooden seats replicated as close to the originals as they possibly could be. Schultz and his team had achieved what they had set out to do. This was thanks not only to their expert skills but also to their knowledge and background research they had done. Last of all the job could not be done without the materials that they possessed such as the finish supplied by Osmo and the locally sourced wood.

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