Jesus back into place again

With a new set of hands and on a new pedestal of the same French limestone the Sacred Heart statue is looking wonderful again.

The statue was installed last Friday in a nice place, inside the school where it formerly stood in the basement: College Hageveld in Heemstede. The statue had to be placed in a fairly empty room, where once the altar of the school chapel used to be, when it was still a minor seminary.

Getting it there was a tricky job, because we had to overcome a stairway of about 1 metres 60 high. To make it even harder there was also a bridge spanning the stairs, leaving very little height for lifting the statue. With a batch of pallets, we filled up the stairs, and with an engine hoist we could lift the statue on the pallets.

And even upstairs we could make good use of this hoist, to lift the statue onto its new base. The hands were still not in place, that only came after the statue was anchored to the wall and to the pedestal with a solid stainless steel wire end in the back and in the base plate .

As I already explained in wrote before, I had first carved two hands out of the same limestone, but by accident both middle fingers broke off. Actually a good thing, for this way I found out that this wasn't strong enough. Now the hands are made with special restoration mortar around a solid stainless steel frame. This way, the statue should last for another century.