Construction scaffolding around the historic Carnegie building is not the type of Christmas decor the city’s Parks and Recreation Department was planning for the venerable building at Ninth and Vermont streets.

But a $400,000 project to repair a parapet wall and replace the roof on the early 1900s building is taking longer than city officials had anticipated.

“We wanted them to be done with it by the end of the month, but it is progressing slower than we wanted to,” said Mark Hecker, the city’s assistant director of parks and recreation. “Every time it gets below 30 it is tough for them to do the work they need to do.”

Hecker said city officials now are considering putting the project on pause for the winter and restarting in the spring. That would allow the scaffolding to be removed from the site.

“We would hope to have the project done in the early spring, at the latest,” Hecker said.

He knows one group that would appreciate having the scaffolding gone in the meantime. The building is a popular location for weddings and receptions, and wedding parties like to have pictures taken on the front steps of the historic building that once served as the city’s library.

“We have some type of event there nearly every weekend,” Hecker said. “The building is really filling a pretty good niche in the community.”

The building, though, has racked up some costs. The $400,000 roof project follows a 2010 project that cost the city about $1.4 million. That project added a 2,000 square-foot addition onto the building, made it handicapped accessible and did some interior remodeling for the offices of the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area.

Hecker said this latest project started out as a fairly routine roof replacement on the 1902 portion of the building. But then city officials discovered that the parapet wall — the wall-like structure that extends above the roof line — was in bad condition. He said the wall was taking on water, was leaning a couple of inches and was at risk of collapsing onto the roof. The rebuilding process has been extensive, in part, because the project was required to meet some state historic regulations to ensure that the wall was rebuilt in the correct style.

But Hecker said he thinks this project should put the building in good shape for the future.

“There is always going to be something to do on a building of that age, but this catches us up on the major structural stuff,” he said.