July 1st Update – Building the Immaculata

Located in St. Marys, Kansas. https://www.anewimmaculata.org/blog/2021/7/1/behind-the-scenes-july-2021-update

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Welcome back to the Immaculata Project here in St. Mary’s, Kansas. Today, we'd like to give you an update on construction progress over the last month. Right now, I’m standing 75 feet in the air at the same elevation and location that will house the statue of St. Cyril of Alexandria on the north transept wall. The statue will be six feet tall, so approximately the same height as myself. 25 feet above me atop the cupola roof will be where the statue of Our Lady will stand.

So, as you can see a lot of progress has been made since our last video. This lower section here was sheeted and not waterproofed. None of the fireproofing or framing was done. These guys here are now buttoning that up. We've got the Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel there – that structure is all done. The baptistry is all done. In between those two you can see that lower roof – that's the roof over the confessionals – four confessionals on both sides. The next little roof with the angles, that's above our side aisles. And then that wall that the men are working on, with the four windows framed, that's our clearstory wall. And the roof trusses will sit right on top of that, that's our 65 feet from our nave floor to ceiling.

As you can see they have the structural steel for the arches installed. Those are about 27 feet above the porch. Those will support all the masonry and the structure above that. At the last video, we saw the cry room floor. Now we've got the choir loft beams in and they're starting to put the the steel decking on the cry room floor so that they can pour the structural slab above that. (Background talking: How's it going? Good. We're shooting a video. You're in it!)

It's going to get a little bit loud in here. They're doing a lot of work on the roof of the baptistry right now. They're welding the lantern on. They're setting it up on the floor here because it's nice and flat – a lot of detail.

So, after these guys get done working on this, it'll be picked up and set over on the baptistry. You can see how big this thing looks and when you look at it in the drawing, it's a pretty small item. So these round columns here are going to be the row of the marble columns that separate the Nave from the side aisles.

So, at the end of this row of columns on the south side is the St. Joseph Side Chapel. Inside of this chapel will be decorated with very nice wood honoring St. Joseph the Carpenter, Head of the Holy Family, and Patron of the Universal Church – and somebody who's been giving us a lot of help on this project. As you can see, the cupola is now complete and ready to receive the roof which we'll talk about later.

I want to show you some of the progress that's been made back here. As you can see, some of the sheeting is already being put on the roof. Fireproofing isn't completely on yet. Once they have all of the welding done then they'll come in and fireproof the whole inside.

Let's go in the ‘back of house’ here – back where the sacristy and flower room area are. It looks like the service staircase has been installed. Okay so above us here you can see that they've got some of the brick work done. You can see some detail around the round window there. Above that brick is the dental pieces of the cast stone. Each one of those is very heavy. It has to be laid by hand very precise so that everything lines up and looks good.

This section, once they get this all complete (which maybe this week) all this scaffolding will come down and then they'll be able to put the trusses over this ‘back of house’ area and start to get that sheeted.

All right, so now let's swing over this way. We're going to go ahead and take a look out the back window to see what kind of progress has been made back there. All right, as you can see over the last four weeks a lot of work has been done. Back here, this is back of house, so you don't see this from the road. Not too many people get this view. The brick and the cast stone is installed all the way up to the eave of where this roof section will be. You can see the control joints. They're kind of the darker areas here - they will get filled in with a colored caulking...

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