Average home renovation jobs usually start with removing fragile items and covering the rest with protective cloths. But the work going on at Glencairn Museum — home of the Raymond Pitcairn family from the 1930s to the 1970s — is no average home spruce up. Peter Crimmins, WHYY, reported on how the museum is protecting its treasures.

The work being done to the Bryn Athyn structure is so extensive —it includes the addition of air conditioning, a amenity affecting just about the entire footprint — that its scheduled completion isn’t until late 2023.

Two issues quickly arose: protecting the Pitcairn’s priceless treasures and keeping them publicly accessible.

A solution came from a long-ago-forged relationship between Glencairn and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). Glencairn Museum director Brian Henderson decided to temporarily relocate certain items downtown to not only spare them the rigors of dust and disruption but also to enable visitors to continue to discover and enjoy them.

The loans are not the first transferal of treasures from Montgomery County to the PMA.

When it opened its medieval art gallery in 1931, Pitcairn let the museum borrow a few of his collection to fill out its somewhat sparse displays, according to PMA curator Jack Hinton.

Hinton said he eagerly agreed to welcome inventory back again.

“Glencairn is an incredible treasure of medieval art, in ways that parallel and diverge from what we have here in the museum,” he said. “It’s an exceptional thing, because Glencairn doesn’t tend to lend works of art of this importance.”

More on Glencairn Museum’s temporary removal of treasures and its extensive renovation plans is at WHYY.