FARMINGTON – The plan to revamp Church Street and the surrounding area is one step closer to fruition since the town chose an engineering consulting firm Thursday.

Dirigo Consulting of Waterville has worked with Farmington in the past. “I always enjoy working with the town of Farmington,” Dirigo’s Jim Lord said Friday. “I’m sure it’ll be a very good project.”

There’s an awful lot to be done before work can get started, Town Manager Richard Davis said Friday. The Church Street project committee has a few months yet before anything final needs to be decided, and members are working hard to get it all done.

The outline for the work has already been done. But, as they say, the devil’s in the details.

A $150,000 federal community development block grant will pay for renovations to Church Street itself – road repairs, sidewalks, curbing, lighting and engineers. The town is matching the grant with nearly $40,000 of its own for labor and materials to do some of the preliminary work.

But exactly where sidewalks will be on the now-sidewalk-less and narrow street is undecided, as are the design and positioning of decorative lighting and the location and position of parking spaces. Whether or not the street will be made one-way is also up in the air, and so is the content and location of historical kiosks, which are being designed with the aid of the Farmington Historical Society and the Maine Mountain Heritage Network.

In the future, the planned historical walking tour of town will include a visit to a Farmington history museum, historical society Vice President Taffy Davis said Friday. The society is in the process of applying for its own CDBG grant, she said, which she hopes will help pay for the nearly $400,000 in renovations to the old North Church on High Street.

There were once aqueducts under Farmington, Davis said. They provided Farmington’s first water supply in the 1800s. One backed up right into the ground around the old church years back, she said, badly damaging the church’s foundation to the point that now, the floor is starting to separate from the rest of the structure.

With the $50,000 they’ve already raised and a possible $100,000 if awarded the CDBG grant, Davis said the society might be ready to do the first phase of reconstruction as soon as 2008.

Most people have never even seen the interior of the 1800s church, Davis said. She hadn’t before joining the society. “I know we can get the building open,” she said.