Restoration of buildings

This phase started in January 2011. The chain of contractor Huurman from Delft had already been installed in 2010. On January 13, 2011, the scaffolding for the barracks and for the powder and projectile magazine started. The plan was that this phase would be completed before the summer of 2011, but there were a number of setbacks. The outer leaf (the outer layer of stones) of the barracks turned out to be partly separate from the underlying construction. It also turned out that more iron was used as anchors during construction than had been budgeted in advance. In particular, the anchors discovered in the keystones of the vault of the windows were a surprise. These anchors have been removed and will not be replaced.

Once the first hatches have been installed, the next ones go faster and faster. In a few days, many shutters have already been hung. The shutters are newly made of oak. The old shutters consisted of three planks thick oak. These planks were fixed with iron forged nails. Over time, the nails had started to rust and it turned out to be impossible to replace bad parts of the hatches. The shutters are also hollow. Nothing of this can be seen on the outside, but because of these adjustments it costs less oak, but more importantly. The weight of the hatches is considerably lower, so that the mechanical action on the thumb blocks (those are the blocks that contain the iron thumbs that carry the hatches) is less and the risk of damage in the future is less.

People are working the concrete elements of the coastal battery. The German R 612 has now been closed with fences so that the vandalism as well as the restoration work remains as good as possible. The narrow gauge railway has been cleaned and preserved. The parapets will all be provided with the beautiful block pattern again. The group stations (measuring stations) are now all closed with steel doors. The measuring slots have also all been provided with new ironwork with a cover plate on the outside. Steel structures have been installed on the inside of all group stations to prevent further decay. This is important because this concrete does not have steel reinforcement to hold it all together. In 1900, when these objects were built, this construction method was just not yet known.