table to be auctioned off at the St John’s School bazaar later this month.
A piece of Cobar’s early history will go up for auction at St John’s School Bazaar next Friday with an original door from the St Laurence O’Toole Church to go under the hammer.
The door, which was saved and has been made into a table by locals Tarra and Josh Burke, is one of a number of auction items St John’s School’s P&F is planning to auction at this year’s bazaar.
Tarra said she noticed the doors being replaced when she was dropping her son off to school one day.
“I do up old doors as a kind of hobby,” Tarra said.
She enquired as to what was going to happen to the old doors and was shocked when she found out they were going to the tip.
“I made a donation to the church and said I’ll take them.”
Tarra took the two doors and planned to make them into tables to serve food off.
“They are really big so I only needed one for my house so I offered the other to the school and asked if they wanted me to do one up to auction off,” Tarra said.
The P&F jumped at the idea and Tarra and her husband Josh have been working on the table getting it ready for the bazaar auction next week.
John Collins, a member of the Catholic Church Parish Committee, said the church doors were getting hard to close and had seen a lot of wear and tear, and so were replaced earlier this year.
Also somewhat a local history expert, John said he believes the doors could be the original front doors from the church built in 1907.
“I showed Tarra a picture of the original church and she reckons they are the same ones,” John said.
“That would make them 108 years old.”
Tarra said while she is unsure as to what type of wood the doors were made out of, she said you can tell it’s really old.
“I think we counted seven layers of paint that we’ve sanded through.”
She said the top layer is green and the next layer is maroon.
“Mum got married 30 years ago in the church and the doors were maroon then, so it sort of tells a story and a timeline.”
She said it’s taken them a couple of weeks to take off the door hinges and bolts, sand it back, fix up some of the wear around the edges and lacquer it.
“We decided to leave it with a marbled look so you could see the different layers.
“I like it looking old, and didn’t want to strip too much off it,” Tarra said.
The door was then mounted on to a dining table frame with a plaque on it that tells a bit of its history.
And with all that history behind it, it’s going to be hard to set a reserve price on what is a very unique piece of furniture.
