All right. Hey everybody, my name is Ben, Anthony, and I'm your technical host for today, this is valuing cyclical maintenance for museum interpretation. Unknown Speaker 27:34 And I am going to get our day started just a few reminders here. We are recording this event. Any questions you have, please put those in the q&a section of this work. I have this during the presentation, and then we'll collect those and can do those at the end, your hosts will be keeping an eye on those as well. Please use the chat function to share comments or resources, while the presentation is going on. There is closed captioning available it's auto closed captioning. So feel free to use that if that would be helpful. And then finally, if you are experiencing technical problems, what we normally encourage you to do is to leave the room and come back in, nine times out of 10 that will fix it, but you can always throw any concerns you have, or issues you're experiencing in the chat and we'll try and take care of those for you as well. All right, with that, I'm going to introduce Leanne, who is going to be your host and moderator for today, to get us kicked off. Unknown Speaker 28:53 Thank you, Ben. I'm Lia Neff Heppner the president and CEO of the Summit County Historical Society of Akron, Ohio, and I'm the region rep, three for the Ohio local history Alliance, it is my pleasure to introduce to you today, Elizabeth Corbin Murphy and Alice Sloane, both of perspectives, sponsor actually of this year's conference, so let me tell you a little bit about them in just a second I'm going to be able to share my screen and show you their pictures, Elizabeth Corbin Murphy is a principal of the historic architecture studio at perspectives. She is dedicated to preservation and restoration technology and design she consults with building owners and architects regarding state and federal rehabilitation tax credits, design, and adaptive use related to old or historic structures, detailed restoration specifications, historic interiors and design guidelines for historic urban centers. Elizabeth is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a recipient of the AIA Ohio Gold Medal, the highest honor bestowed on an individual and the profession. Alice holds a Master of Science in historic preservation, conservation science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her professional experience spans more than a decade, she can contribute to any phase of a project, but she has expansive knowledge regarding preventive architectural conservation, which she uses to prepare restoration and preservation plans, technical building assessments and historic community design guidelines. I am looking forward to their presentation, and I know you will enjoy it too. Unknown Speaker 30:43 Okay, the host has to uncover us. Oh man, I guess that's on you. Unknown Speaker 30:55 Working on Unknown Speaker 30:55 it. Okay. That's odd. You should have the ability. Try this. Well, while you're working on that I would like to introduce Lynn Debussy, who is the Executive Director of how our house in Akron, we've worked with her and she's joining us today so she can answer questions on our case studies that are related to the house, our house. Unknown Speaker 31:37 Elizabeth, you should be able to start your video now. Okay. There we go, perfect. Unknown Speaker 31:46 Thank you. Okay, Alice if you'd like to share your screen. Yep. Unknown Speaker 31:55 Okay, I can introduce our learning objectives. Objectives for today. The title of our presentation. We tried to make catchy and impactful. We start with the title is reading never stop improving valuing cyclical maintenance and preventive architectural conservation for museum interpretation. These are the four learning objectives we are covering today. We aim to help you understand the value of maintenance and preventive architectural conservation, and to better speak to these issues, as well as identify the components of a lifecycle preservation management plan. We will cover different historic materials, and the Secretary of Interior standards, as well as some ideas on how to bring continued care to the forefront of museum interpretation, trying to scroll forward here. As the snap moving, click, and there we go. All right, so here's the beautiful Howard house and Akron, and it will be our case study for today. And Elizabeth has already introduced Linda voc button word about how our house to get you excited to hear more about it is that it's currently owned by the University of Akron, and it's listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The mansion is a rare regional reminder of the period when the canal town of Akron transitioned to become a railroad hub and centered industry by 1880. The second empire influenced building was constructed in 1871 to the design of Jacob Schneider for Akron industrialist, John H Hauer, who in 1881 formed a milling company that was a predecessor to the Quaker Oats company, so we're excited that Linda Busey will be joining us. So I'd like to open with this dramatic quote from William Morris, who was alive in the 19th century and he founded England's Society for the Protection of ancient buildings in 1877, he founded it to unquote promote maintenance and conservative treatments. He is credited with this quote, it is for all these buildings that we plead and call upon those who have to deal with them, to put protection in the place of restoration to stave off decay by daily care. Thus, and only thus can we protect our ancient buildings and hand them down instructive and venerable to those that come after us. So Morris talked about protection. We might substitute the word protection with current accepted language in the US, which is preservation also internationally known as conservation, preservation or conservation is together one of the four treatments of historic properties, and these four treatments have been codified by the National Park Service and the 1980 amendments to the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. Most of you are probably familiar with them. So in review. Not only do we have preservation and conservation, but we have restoration which is returning a building to its historic period, rehabilitation which is adapting a historic building to a change in use and reconstruction which is rebuilding missing features Unknown Speaker 35:45 or rebuilding an entire building. Unknown Speaker 35:49 Yes. Thank you, Elizabeth. Now the Secretary of Interior standards for treatment of historic properties has a standard list of standards for preservation. And this Court Of course I stated that preservation and conservation entail maintaining the existing fabric, and two of the standards, I'd like to point out the of the eight that are on your screen are that protection and stabilization are emphasized in the first standard. This relates to addressing deferred maintenance and this must be achieved before cyclical maintenance and preventive architectural conservation can even take place. The sixth standard talks about the concept of evaluation, and it reads that the existing condition of historic features will be evaluated to determine the appropriate level of intervention needed. So this refers to developing documentation strategies for monitoring changes in condition. So, the four approaches to building care can kind of be broken down to two overall approaches and both are active processes, distinguished by urgency. We have an interventive treatment, which is shown on your left side of the slide in the blue and intervention intervention of treatment is reactive and largely consists of episodic campaigns that require extensive capital investment. The urgent items are shown the urgency of the items are shown on the right of your screen, and may include such things as mitigating a hazardous condition, if you have a piece of cornice that appears detached moderately urgent would be correcting deficiencies, such as a step crack in the brick masonry, depending upon the location of that stuff crack and its severity, even less urgent, one would argue is improving serviceability and improving aesthetics. So improving serviceability would be an example of addressing your drafty windows with providing some storm windows, and improving aesthetics might address addressing deposits accumulating on your building. So preventive conservation, in contrast, is arguably more proactive and ongoing and requires continual small investments. So, while considering a site's master plan, there could be three parts to promote a preventive architectural conservation, prioritizing the issues to correct the deficiencies, performing cyclical maintenance such as seasonal cleaning, painting, and repairs and kind of a cut off of that is performing predictive maintenance such as projecting out anticipated needs over decades into the future, Unknown Speaker 39:02 which could be as simple as cleaning the gutters. Unknown Speaker 39:05 Yes. Thank you, Elizabeth. Third item is a kind of an idealized component, conducting frequent informed observation and documentation. Oops, I think I went backwards. Okay. There we go. This chart shows that cyclical maintenance, really is never ending when the weather turns to winter, as is shown in yellow. In this slide, it is not time to rest, it is time to work on the interior of your building and plan and engage a design professional, which is exactly what how our house done, in our case study, we were doing undertaking the observations in the winter in December when it was very very cold outside, but we got to also go inside and look around there to know my era was working. Okay, so moving from cyclical maintenance planning to preventive architectural conservation preventive architectural conservation can be defined as daily observation and documentation, little and often addressing the root causes of deterioration to slow them down and mitigating future damaging environments, really the goal is to preserve more of the original fabric and prolong the service life at a lower cost, so large discrete projects are not necessary. So, is this achievable, and I tried to look into answering that with the help of, I don't want to go to that slide yet, with the help of serving 60 historic house museums, the professionals with 16 historic house museums about preventive architectural conservation terminology approaches and implementation. And this was the subject of my 2008 thesis in graduate school, and the survey respondents were pretty diverse, you can see from this slide that the owning operating entities have 60 responses included not only nonprofits, but also local governments, state governments federal governments and private foundation or a mix of nonprofit and another entity. These respondents were also varied in the number of historic buildings owned and operated. While almost half of the respondents did have two to five buildings, and more than, 20 buildings was represented by about 23% of them, there was still a good number of 12% that only had one building. And then, about 20% that had between, you know, six and 20 buildings, and this was all across the nation, number of people on the staff also varied, although there were some institutions that had more than 20 people on staff, that's 37% of the respondents. 8% of them only had one person on staff, so I tried to reach those individuals as well. Now, 47 of 60, of the, of the respondents did understand the concept of preventive architectural conservation. But 83% report a maintenance backlog, and only 33% are really able to use their preventive architectural conservation plan. Unknown Speaker 42:58 So, Unknown Speaker 43:01 these findings show that survey respondents in the US, acknowledge the importance of proactive building care, but decry the lack of support available, resulting in lack of budgets, staffing, training, access to expertise skilled crafts people, and software tools to track. Now if you're interested in finding out a little bit more about the tools that organizations can use to tackle preventive conservation, you can look into my fellow grad students, thesis from 10 years after mine in 2018 Liz Trumbull, and I can give you a link to her thesis as well at the end of this presentation so I feel like I threw a lot of, kind of, oh, you know what, there's, there's a lot of issue and challenge out there with implementing cyclical maintenance and preventive architectural conservation but as Elizabeth will now talk to you about. There is, there is a way to work together within your organization and even get outside assistance and tackling the plan for, for preventive conservation and cyclical maintenance so Elizabeth, take it away. Unknown Speaker 44:23 Okay. So, we are going to start with an example. It's, it's really very difficult, you know, Alice just threw a whole bunch of terminology at you. And, of course, we expect you to have it all memorized by now so that when we throw it back again you'll still know, but the idea of cyclical maintenance on a building where there's only one or two or six employees, and a lot of volunteers who that change often. It is difficult to establish a routine. So we're going to show you here an example of where observation and routine is essential. This is the Mahoning County Courthouse in Youngstown, Ohio, it's a magnificent building, and we were part of the team. And this was a capital project, as opposed to routine maintenance. We were charged with repairing restoring the upper quarter of the building that would include the in tablatures and the dental work, and the balustrade across the top and included restoration of the copper sheet metal statues that are over the entry. So we spent a lot of time on this roof, fellas. Next. So, it rained a lot, we were doing this in the fall, it was raining a lot and and you know it's just water. So we were looking down from the roof of the courthouse to the roof of the annex building, And I don't know if you can tell but there are clouds reflecting off the water. On the top of this roof. So from our cell phones, on the roof we called the county trying to figure out who was in charge of that building, and how could we pass on our observations, so that something could get done. Think about it. That building was approximately 40 feet wide by approximately 100 feet long, and that water was about five inches deep. That's over 12,000 gallons of water at 8.34, pounds per gallon. That water sitting on the roof was over 103,000 pound load added to the roof structure. It just looks like a little water. You know what's the big deal. So we located someone, and suggested that he start by cleaning the drain well it's not really on my list of things to do. And we said, just try cleaning the drains so he did, he put on his rubber boots and he went out there and he cleaned the drains and can you see how fast that water is going down the roof drains well within an hour. The roof was cleared. And that, that, you know, it's not my job but I'll take credit for the solution. And and frankly we were very happy to give that gentleman credit for the solution, because he's the one that put on the rubber boots and pulled the leaves out of the out of the drain. And you'll also notice that it's already clogged again. But these are routine issues that are easily resolved, but only resolved if somebody's paying attention. So it's important to know that you any of you who are belong to a property can be part of the solution and not necessarily creating huge expensive things. So why does maintenance get deferred maintenance gets deferred because deferred means zero on the budget. In the larger groups, you have capital budgets, and you have maintenance budgets. And if you run out of capital money then you like to steal it from or borrow it from the maintenance budget, but the capital projects don't even get funded, until the conditions are so poor that they require restoration. And what Allison I advocate is the observation and continual maintenance, to prevent the capital budgets, because you can save money and you can keep your building, looking longer Unknown Speaker 49:24 on a daily basis. So, the costs are elusive, it's hard to figure out how much it's gonna cost you to take care of your building. It's a very important thing to do. But it's difficult. The responsibility is vague. One of our really good clients was the epsilon Eleanor Ford house, we wrote a cyclical maintenance plan for them, and they are my best example of how a team takes that responsibility seriously. But even there, the responsibilities are vague, because they have one person in charge of the exterior of the building, and because the building is as much of the interpretation as the contents, then they had a different person who was the conservator for the inside of the building, and a different person in charge of collections, and the different person who takes care of the money. And then, you know, then there was a different person who did landscape. So they had five different departments who had to get together and decide whose responsibility was what. So the intangible and the invisible issues are the ones that are hard to find, and hard to fund. If your front steps are falling apart, it's easy to raise money for that. But if your gutters go into the ground into a system of tile that's all broken, and your basement is leaking, Nobody can see that. So it's difficult to wrap your arms around it. Also, when you're thinking about going day to day your abstract priorities for the future, our hearts, connect to the daily grind of taking care of the property. And then just to, just to make it more difficult. I would guess that most of the people on the call today are from non income producing properties. So if you don't have a profit. Where does your money come from. Now, we know that it would take us another whole hour discussion, to talk about how you budget for cyclical maintenance, and we're happy to do that sometime, but I think we're gonna slide over it today. So Alice, are you ready to talk about the plan. Oh. Oh you want me to do it. Okay. We can keep doing that. Alright, so the key components of our maintenance and capital projects plan. We have guidelines, specifications timetable staffing plan and budget. Again, deferred maintenance continually gets cycled into capital projects. And, in an ideal situation, that wouldn't happen. However in some organizations, it's easier to fund capital projects, so you may do that purposefully. Okay, our processes include communication design control, quality control, and cost control. So each one of those has to be personal to the property and personal to your organization. It doesn't do us any good to come in and hand you a whole new communication plan that, you know, you can't implement because you just don't work that way. So, if we're putting together a maintenance plan. We have to be very certain that we are setting this up to work within your system. Now the content what goes into a cyclical maintenance plan. These are the general categories that we put in into a maintenance plan, they can expand, they can contract depending on on how big your property is how many people you have or maybe how much you want to spend on your plan, or if you're doing it yourself, as opposed to hiring someone. So we generally have documentation materials inventory defects survey treatment specifications schedules budget planning, and then an outline of how you do this within your own structure. The documentation, generally includes original drawings, photographic records we were very fortunate to have some good records of the house, sketching and field notes, Unknown Speaker 54:10 measured measured or as built drawings can be included rectified photography. Now rectified photography is photography done with a large format camera where the photographs are corrected for perspective, so that there's no perspective distortion in them, and then you can actually measure off of them. It's a, it's a wonderful tool, and not done as often anymore or if it's a lot of a lot of it is done by rectifying on the computer instead of in the darkroom. And then we also use T pass document sets tablet PC annotation system, where we put drawings or photographs into the computer, we take the computer in the field, a tablet, and we're able to mark right on the drawings, where the photographs are taken, where the defects are. And that helps us to quantify for contractors, and it helps the owner because the owner can go in and click on a note on the T pass documents, and pull up a picture of exactly where it is. Unknown Speaker 55:32 This is materials inventory I think is one of the, actually one of the very most important things. It doesn't take real long to do it, it's not a whole lot of information, but it helps the owner or the director or whomever is is representing this project for the owners to understand the Absolute scope of the project. So there's a huge difference if you have 3000 square feet of brick to repair, or 30,000, square feet of brick to repair. And if you're looking at a house like the house or house where there's decorative hood ornaments, and there's a lot of decorative painted woodwork and mansard slate, all of those kinds of things. If you don't have an accurate count of the materials, it is very easy to fool yourself into thinking that cost of repairs, is much lower than it actually is. We can use rectified photography for, for coming up with those details, we can use existing original drawings, measured drawings now measured drawings I keep putting a question mark next to that because that's a lot of work, where we send students in the students in the field or or architects or combined team. I used to teach that it can't. That's why I said students, but they actually physically measure the building and draw it from scratch by hand or an AutoCAD or Revit or whatever works for them, so that we can have a record according to the historic American buildings survey of the historic structure and the inventory again this is to help us determine the time the dot and the dollars and how it would affect operation. When we did the Ford house maintenance plan, we helped them to determine the number of staff persons, it would take to maintain the building. According to the cyclical maintenance plan that they have agreed to, so they adjusted, they actually did did very well, adjusting persons in on their staff to different tasks, so that they could cover all of this and not get to the end of the year and have everyone say we just didn't have time. Because that's a problem too. You don't want to stress your staff, especially if you like them. So, like defect surveys and the conditions report. Take on site review. This is a picture of of my predecessor Lorraine chambers and my partner Lauren Berge, as we went over every inch of the Ford house looking for conditions and documenting them. This is what we do now in T pass, we look at the building materials, the type of problems, we look at sometimes 24 hour weather conditions. Sometimes we know if there's a change from when we did it the first time, or if there's an urgency. And we also know who did the survey so that we can go back to them and say did you notice this. Some one thing that we noticed on that, that while immediately to the right of Lauren, we had a very interesting pattern of dampness, that we just couldn't figure out and then one morning we were there very early and we saw that the sprinklers in the lawn were spraying the building. That was so easy to fix, always, all we had to do is rename the sprinklers and we got rid of all the problem of the wet wall. So, observation. Unknown Speaker 59:51 So treat treatment guidelines and specifications, we generally put a description of the work, And what we find to be the most important part for staff is to learn how to inspect or review the conditions from one one year to the next or one season to the next, so that the staff can understand the difference in the conditions. And if we don't do anything else in the treatment guidelines, if we can teach the staff how to follow that season to season. Then, it really helps to prevent damage, Or to catch it before it goes too bad. So, we like to think that everybody even, even the docents can contribute to the cyclical maintenance plan. Do you have a docent that only does the ballroom, but they, one day they notice a crack in the ceiling, if they just fill out the form and turn it into maintenance, I saw a crack in the ceiling, then the maintenance persons can come and check it out to see if it's worthy of panic, and sometimes it is, so everybody can be involved in the cyclical maintenance plan, even at a very basic level. So the descriptions of the work include also the materials and equipment and maintenance and cleaning treatments. And then we also talk about the repair and execution and perhaps the priority that it's in, when we did the Henry Ford house. It had, it belonged to the University of Michigan at the time. And so we prioritized the top 12 projects that needed to be addressed as the capital budgets were allowed, and we grouped the projects together to make them reasonable for instance if you're going to paint the garage door one year and then the next year, you're going to take out the garage door so you can fix the grass floor. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So you have to try to group the plans so that you're not having to do anything twice schedules. Some things need to be done on a, on a seasonal schedule like cleaning the gutters and other things can be done on a five or 10 year schedule. So if you put together a common schedule where you see some of the bigger elements you can anticipate them, and you can figure out whether this is a housekeeping chore or if it requires an outside contractor or consultant. And you can you can budget for them you can prioritize your remedial projects, And you can then account for emergencies. Budget Planning. You, most, most of you will have a budget for maintenance. And if you can budget across your year, you'll also have a budget for interpretation and a budget for Access Act, accessing new Unknown Speaker 1:03:29 elements, new, new displays, and then you're going to have a staffing budget. And if you do events that's another budget. So, you have, but you will only have a fixed sum of money so you have to figure out how to apportion it. And if your maintenance, your intended maintenance exceeds the budget that you have, then you need to start to gather those things into groups and think about putting them on a capital budget or consider how to increase your annual spending. So we use a materials inventory, we plan for contingency, which is really important. Let's say you have a maintenance budget and everything's going along just fine and then you have a flood. So, somewhere, you have to make up for that. You also need to plan for inflation, you can't use the same money number every single year. And I would also like to warn you to be wary of bids without specifications. You'll get a lot of people who are well meaning and they'll come in and they'll say, you really need to take care of that chimney it's got these awful cracks in it. Well, they could be very right. But if you don't have a specification that says you have to fix the outlet outside layer of brick, and the fire brick on the inside of the chimney, then perhaps you're not actually repairing the entire chimney the way it should be. So if you have a specification, you can get competitive bids and, or you can even, you can work with a contractor that that you like but at least you will then have an agreement of what work is being done. Okay, So we talked a little bit about intangible. Intangible and invisible issues. Here you can see some efflorescence on the risk, and those kinds of things are visible. How am I going to deal with that. But you also have abstract priorities in, we'd love to fix the back porch, and you have an already established system. So, the university comes in and automatically put salt on everything because they don't want to have any ice around because they don't want anybody to fall and that's a really good thing to worry about, but putting salt on the porch causes the salt layers that you see on this brick. And so, somehow you have to get into the already established system, how do we find a workaround, so that we're not creating more problems and we already have. And so you want to work within the system that you have and you want to work with the clients to get them to a point of being comfortable with the work that must be done. So this is my, my friend Mike Slater, and he was in charge of maintenance at the Ford house when we wrote the cyclical maintenance plan. He used to walk around and collect pieces from any repair that was done at the Ford house, and he set up his own interpretive center inside his power house which is where the maintenance people operated from. So he, there was, you know, organized tours that took people over the whole 12 building complex there were organized tours that took everyone through the house, and there were a couple of them that took people through the power house. And over the years, Mike collected. Things that broke or fell off, or were replaced or repaired, and when people came to the powerhouse, he explained to them how he was taking care of the buildings, and it was amazing people were so interested in this, so, it became part of the interpretation. And this This slide also answers the WHO that I mentioned before, they're outside consultants, and then the physical facilities manager, which is Mike, the inside curator the housekeeping staff. A lot of times people don't understand that even as a housekeeper on housekeeping staff. What you do is really important. If you have 100 year old draperies, how do you clean them. If you are dusting the woodwork. Do I use the spray stuff. No. And if you have brass or bronze hardware. How do you clean it. And so all of those things are really important and they are just as important as the curator who takes care of all of the interpretive materials within the building. And occasionally, you have outside, outside skilled trades that are part of your solution as well. My favorite quote, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I always thought that my mom made that up, because she said that to us all the time. Now they found out it was Alexander Pope, but that's okay. She picked a good quote. And it's it's just a reality check. A lot of times, mistakes are made, because people intend to do well. One of the biggest ones I just mentioned was cleaning brass or bronze. There are materials on the shelf that say, I'm a brass cleaner. But some of those things will scratch the surface, and some of those things will actually change the chemical composition of the top of your brass elements, and they will change colors, they'll be clean, but they've changed colors. So, we need to think about, we need to think long and hard about what materials we're using for cleaning and way the ways we repoint masonry, etc. Unknown Speaker 1:10:02 All right, I'm going to jump back in here and highlight how our house, a little bit more directly. I'm going to highlight a few of the materials and systems that were determined worthy of addressing within the next 10 years. Some more urgent than others, and on the left you can see a historic photo of how our house used to have a neighbor to the right, that is no longer there unfortunately but there is a huge opportunity with having large lawn space available for further interpretation or even just general use of that space. Oh, there we go. All right, um, this first image is regarding wood trim repair and paint. As you can see there, this is kind of an example of preventive architectural conservation at work, not so much the routine observation, but as far as trying to prevent accelerated deterioration of the woodwork, you can see that there's metal flashings over the skyward facing portions, Even though those are there, the red arrow is showing you that there is some deterioration already happening, some of the paint has come off. And, and, you know, paint does have a service life. So, and I do want to give a word about color here, and I'll mention it a little bit later and you could probably even see it in the previous slide. The second empire mansard style was popular in the mid to later 1800s After the lubes mansard roof lines which were very influential and and colors during that period were were dark and rich with greens and dark reds and browns and oranges and olives, there was a complex color combination but before the University of Akron owned this building, I believe that it was decided to to painted this fresh white color that has just been carried through to the present, so it's just it's just something to know that what you're seeing today might not have been as it looked historically. And then we have gutters are always a constant concern the gutters here are actually pretty clean this was taken in the fall. After many of the leaves have fallen, and it's it's IT, problem is access to these to these roofs to get the gutters clean because you really should be cleaning them or debris twice a year you know once in the spring and once in the fall. And I also want to mention that the membrane roofing here also has a service life and that that was something that the property steward, and, and the consultants, you know, believed should be addressed in the next 10 years, that's coming close to the end of the service life whereas slate, you can see a little bit of the slate in there. It has a longer service life it's mostly the flashings that that will need attention slate you know last over 100 years unless you have pieces that fall out here and there that you need to kind of fit back in. Okay, so next to word about masonry. The word masonry as you probably know refers to the units, whether it's stone or brick, and the mortar advanced units together, and the mortar is usually cement and or lime, depending upon the age of the, of the structure. Portland cement wasn't introduced until the 1870s. So, this powerhouse probably had a considerable amount of lime if not solely in line in, in the mortar. Originally, although sometime in the past, I believe, our house was completely repainted but there's, there's no signs of distress in the, in the brackets, it's how it's holding up very well. But mortar is intended to be a sacrificial material to preserve the integrity of the units and mortar should be softer and strength and more porous and permeable than the units, and this requires periodic upkeep and a design mix for appointing should always be guided by a mortar analysis of the original mortar to ensure constituent capable capable compatibility. Unknown Speaker 1:14:53 The picture here is of the porch which is not the not the original porch, it was rebuilt during the mid 20th century, there is concern that the cistern, which was buried in the ground nearby is holding water possibly and contributing to water infiltration so you can see under the porch here on the picture on your right. We did a little examination we got under there and look to see if there was anything obvious. You know there's a lot of debris that's up against the, the foundation but you know, nothing too obvious, so that's why it's believed that perhaps that system, which was used for the indoor plumbing originally provided in the 1871 construction might might be holding water so that that is something that, you know, was desired identified as wanting. Further investigation again not extremely urgent but just a serviceability issue. And then another item for that is more directly related to preventive architectural conservation cyclical maintenance is installation of monitoring systems and including data loggers and crack gauges. You know, the monitoring the data loggers would monitor temperature and relative humidity. Sometimes crack ages can be introduced in the staff taught how to monitor. But it's important to consider the location of the deficiency is here, you know, it's a very visible, decorative component in a, in a portrait and room and what you know is it really completely necessary to introduce this equipment to precisely measure a crack, or can you, can you kind of gauge through the your eyes, which you know is very hard to be precise, but can you kind of gauge if the crack is moving with with the seasons or if it's indeed getting larger. And then conservation care was identified in general not only with masterbath tiles as shown here, but general care of the wood flooring and window care, and really the key here is looking at into architectural conservator coming in and providing care and engaging and then teaching the housekeeping as to proper continuing maintenance. And finally, pretty pictures of the lights and the moldings here. But really this slide I wanted to make a point about electrical as being an important component important system to always make sure is, is addressed and up to date in your, your museum, you know, this includes fire detection and suppression and and servicing the electrical equipment. One thing not to forget those if these, if any kind of updating is undertaken that to include in your cost there will be some kind of plaster repair and painting required. So, we have a couple minutes left. Where before I think we should entertain some questions but, you know, it's pretty, pretty easy and fun to introduce some of these maintenance topics into your museum interpretation, and I hope Linda and Lucy can can speak to some of this because they've had some great success at our house, and having some informational sessions for interested, old house enthusiastic, you know, and if you have monitoring equipment up and visible, you know, you could have some interpretive signage or a docent talk about how the building is being continually cared for and and frequent frequent informed observation is important to the long term care. And then one thing that was cool about how our house, and I wish I had a picture and I couldn't find it. I'm sure it's buried somewhere, is that there is graffiti historic graffiti in that tower and that mansard roof tower that we, that people believe has been left by the metal workers that were up there painting. Painting the models, and it's it's a, it's a read. Read graffiti with historic years recorded. Again I talked about the cistern exploration that could be a great, great topic for, Unknown Speaker 1:19:46 You know, getting the public involved and in exploration and then pain analysis as you can see in this picture, there definitely is not all one color the sashes themselves you can really see in that third story are dark and the SIR window surrounds our lighter color, so I want to have some time for questions so just in closing cyclical maintenance is preservation cyclical maintenance and preventive architectural conservational throw that in there really is never done. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 1:20:26 Well, we definitely would love to thank Elizabeth analysis for their time. It's a little overwhelming, with what you've provided but also it's so concise, and really helpful. We do have a few questions in the queue. The first one is, does your agency provide this service to organizations and can we contact you to set up this service, and, and find out how we can put it into our budget and and start this cyclical maintenance. Unknown Speaker 1:20:56 Sure. Yes we do this on a lot of different scales the, the plan that we did for Edsel Ford had three volumes and it's used all the time but we've also done them where they're set for much smaller buildings, and we'd be happy to talk to anyone, even who wants to try to assemble their own there I would want to add here, there are now, a lot of software packages that help you with your scheduling and your budgeting. However, they do require input, you have to put in there, what needs to get done what your plans are all of those kinds of things, so there there's a lot of different ways to approach a cyclical maintenance plan. The idea is to get your team on board with the whole concept, and we'd be happy to help you. Unknown Speaker 1:21:58 Thank you. And as a reminder to Ohio local history Alliance. Attendees at a past regional meeting we talked about disaster preparedness and some of that software. We don't want to get to that point before you need it for this cyclical maintenance, but please remember these options are available to you. Another question we have is going to involve Linda, how is how our house folding in their discussions of cyclical maintenance with their museum interpretation, Linda, can you help us with that. Unknown Speaker 1:22:27 Um, We try to as we're giving tours we try to explain to our guests, how we go about our annual maintenance and what all that involves usually that comes up a lot. Pardon me a lot more during the holiday season. We battled glitter for about six months after the holiday ends. So we're always kind of reminding our volunteers and our decorators and our guests that those kinds of things are very harmful to our collection pieces to the house to the woods in the house. So we do have opportunities to answer questions. And, um, kind of discuss, you know, our annual deep cleaning process, and some of the things that we do not just about the physical structure itself, but also the textiles, and, and, you know draperies and and other things that and carpets and things like that so we do have opportunity to discuss it, so that's, I find that helpful. Unknown Speaker 1:23:36 That's a great quote you have behind you, Linda. Unknown Speaker 1:23:40 Oh, thank you. I made this. It's hard to change up my background, it inspires me. Um Did that answer the question. Um, yeah. Okay. Unknown Speaker 1:23:57 Yes, it did and you know that's a great point about glitter. I think that most of us that run nonprofit historic houses, really hate glitter, but it does make things sparkle, so that's an excellent example. There was another question, and I apologize I switch screens just for a minute, how, what, how it is how our house using your plan so can you go into a little bit more detail I know that Alice and Elizabeth mentioned, being able to identify staff members and in your case, I know you also have a number of amazing volunteers so. How has that worked for you to implement what they've helped put together with your team. Unknown Speaker 1:24:39 We would like to have absolutely done everything on the suggested list but being owned by the University of Akron and I know Alison and Elizabeth have heard me say that numerous times. That's kind of a fine line and I think I would be interested to talk to privately owned facilities to see how, how their plans work a little bit better than our plan. We do our annual thing we do keep an eye on things we do observe, we don't always have the funding that we need to go forward. We have a running list of things that need to be done and a lot of it is based on the plan, the, the plan that perspectives put together for us last year in 2020, and it's just sometimes overwhelming to look at all of the things that still need to be done, and to look at the, the, you know, there's not enough funds, really, you know, and, and that's a problem for us, and it's been an ongoing problem for us. So we try to do what we can, you know, to maintain and go forward. And, and protect the house and the collections, but we don't always get to do what we would like to do the bigger projects still need to be done. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 1:26:16 We got two questions that kind of go along that same line which you've mentioned about having other maintenance. One of them wants to know if the Ohio Historic Preservation Office at Ohio History Connection can help develop a maintenance plan, and then kind of in conjunction with that, how can small museums that are facilities owned by local governments better work with the government to accomplish the tasks that kind of go together it sounds like you're hoping to work with a bigger agency. I know you discuss that a little bit in your presentation, but are there some other tips you might be able to share with both jelly, and John who asked these questions. Unknown Speaker 1:27:01 So Alice Do you want to try that one. Unknown Speaker 1:27:07 I can speak to how Europe is implementing best practices, a little bit with these public private relationships. Is that is that getting too broad, are we, we're trying to focus it into America though, aren't we. So exemplary, and I really just want to show this slide about some of the, the wonderful, best practices that are being used in Netherlands and Flanders in the UK and so specifically monument watch is, is kind of a public private partnership where the inspectors are due, are able to, they are they're funded to go around to different house museums and other historic sites, and do these baseline inspections and surveys and work with the, the owners to identify projects that, and I think that you're even assigning some cost estimating but the government supports us in these countries so it's it's it's predicted primarily funded through. Unknown Speaker 1:28:23 Yes, and there's, there's a lot of places you can look for information Scottish heritage Scottish heritage has wonderful publications, the National Park Service has preservation briefs on the care that they're talking usually on the care of a specific material. So, the American Institute of conservation for Historic and Artistic Works aiic Down in the corner of this slide. They do a CAP program. In fact, Lorraine chambers who is in the within the lawn chair at the Florida House helped to write this program, and basically as you apply to them and they will send a professional. For two days to your site, just to get you started. You'll have then a three or four page, conservation, how to, or what to do next list, and you can get that through the AI see those, those are good. I did see a question pop up about recommending software. I would say that I can't do that right off the top of my head. I know some programs, but the programs vary so much that I would say the selection of your software has to do with more how you operate. And just like I said at the very beginning we have to make sure that the cyclical maintenance plan is set to you, I would say the same thing for the software, we you have to pick one that you're going to actually work with, you know, If you, if you get the absolute Cadillac best piece of software, it's no good if nobody wants to work with it, so. Unknown Speaker 1:30:10 Well that's a great point Elizabeth and to consider using you as consultants, it may not be that you're going to have an opportunity to work with them on the whole plan but maybe they could benefit from your consultation of that software, so they really should talk with experts, before even trying to do it on their own. Now we do have a few other comments that have come in. And you can see them there in the chat that the Historic Preservation Office may be able to help with some of these options with their Ohio History Core members so remember to do that or maybe if you're involved with the Steps program for a SLH and definitely keep in touch with Betsy at the Ohio local history office for more questions, but we do have a very technical question as we're getting ready to wind up our amazing session. And I'm not sure if you can answer it, but I know there are many of us that want to know the answer, so I'm going to ask it for them. They said that a part of their building is made of sandstone that's already crumbling. Do you have any suggestions for proper cleaning. I would also tack on there for stopping the destruction. So I'll leave you with that if you can help us and if you have other questions, please put them in the chat and we'll try to get answers after the session. Unknown Speaker 1:31:30 Now if you want to go where do you want me to go. Unknown Speaker 1:31:32 You can go, I Unknown Speaker 1:31:35 okay so crumbling sandstone. The question is why is it crumbling. I think that we need to figure out why it is crumbling before we can address, can it be stopped. So let me give you a for instance sandstone is, you know, comes out of the bottom of a creek right so it's it's layered. And if you set it. You want to set it in the same way you lift it out of the quarry. So if you turn it 90 degrees, and you set it in the building wrong, then it's likely to come off one layer at a time. And, and that's a completely different problem than if say somebody sandblasted. Okay so until you can figure out the cause of the problem. It's very difficult to figure out how to fix the problem. And I brought salt up once before. Sandstone can wick. In other words, soak up water from let's say driveway level up to the side of the building as high as 30 feet. So if you have salt on your driveway, and it's wet all the time, and you're soaking it up, the sandstone, you're gonna, you could have salt up 30 feet in the air. So, that's another different problem that might be maintenance, let's say, what you do for that is you sloped the earth, away from the foundation just a little bit so that the water drains down the driveway instead of towards the building, and you talk with your maintenance people so that you can figure out some product other than road salt. And, you know kitty litter I mean there's a lot of solutions and it depends a little bit on where you are in the country. But if you could keep from wicking water up the sandstone 30 feet in the air that has debris in it, that would help prevent your problems in the sandstone as well. So, I know you thought that was going to be an easy one, it's, I'm afraid it's not Unknown Speaker 1:33:51 aware. You also want to be aware of coatings to if you don't want to have a coating that traps water in fact we don't generally recommend coating any kind of natural stone. You want the masonry to be able to breathe so I don't know if your your stone was coated previously and that's why it's spalling now or, you know, it's just, just beware, beware, if someone says they're gonna solve your problems by making plying a water repeller. Unknown Speaker 1:34:23 Yeah and that answer might vary depending on where you are in the country but in Northeast Ohio where we go through 30 freeze thaw cycles every winter. You absolutely cannot, cannot coat your sewn, because if water gets behind it and freezes, it's just going to pop the face off. If you're somewhere where they don't have any pre saw cycles, then maybe you could think about it. Unknown Speaker 1:34:51 Well thank you, I'm on behalf of Ohio local history Alliance board and all of those in attendance today Elizabeth and Alice thank you so much and we appreciate this presentation, it will be available for attendees, after the session is over after the whole conference is over, I should say, and we're especially thankful for Linda Busey for joining us from how our house to share how they have been able to take opportunity and learn from the cyclical maintenance that's taught to them by perspectives, a sponsor of this year's conference. Thank you all for attending. Unknown Speaker 1:35:23 Thank you everybody. Unknown Speaker 1:35:24 Thank you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai