St. Joseph’s Side Chapel, confessional structures, a first look at Romanesque style cast stone, and more...

Watch all of the progress from the last 30 days condensed into a 360-degree personal tour at The Immaculata Project site.

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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. After this back section is completely bricked, and the section above me here, all those dental pieces get installed, they'll take the scaffolding down and this ‘back of house’ section can be roofed. We have all of the light gauge trusses staged and ready to install. We have a very good roofing contractor that we use on campus, JB Turner Roofing. They do excellent work. And we're happy to have them on the project.

So we're here on the south side. As you can see the masons have got a pretty good head start and they're working up the ‘back of house’ area there. Above that you can see that the trusses have been installed, the sheeting has been installed. So I just want to show you behind us here... we have the light gauge trusses all assembled. These are assembled on the ground in banks of four. And then they pick these up and set them on in sections. It really would it goes really rapidly when they do start setting the roof trusses.

All right, so what we have here is our cast stone stockyard. This is all the cast stone pieces. We chose cast stone for this project over our limestone. Our natural limestone here in Kansas can be soft, it can be porous. A lot of our buildings on campus have some porous rock which creates issues – water traveling through this product. [Cast stone] is very stable. It's made with a dry tamp method. It's moisture cured with heat. It's very stable, very strong. It's a very good choice for the exterior of our building since we wanted this to be a timeless project. The colors are not pigments. They're not stained. It's a makeup of different colored sands that they blend together and put polymers in and cement, and it creates this beautiful stone. We're going to walk over and I'm going to show you our masonry mock-up panel and [show you] the stages on how we chose the brick and cast stone colors that we did.

So a project of this scale, in order to get the brick colors right, it was very important that we chose the right color pattern. We did have a very specific feel and look we wanted this building to be. You can see on campus, one of our buildings Bellarmine... we were trying to get that color. So our architect drew up this pretty large mock-up. In it shows a lot of the details that we'll see on the building. The soldier course, all of the cast stone pieces. This gives us an opportunity to really see what the brick looks like with mortar. Over the board, you can see it looks a lot different. This also gives us an opportunity to help us choose our downspouts and trim colors for the exterior. We had this mock-up started with regular gray mortar. And then we tried some colored mortar. And when we saw the difference it was clear that we were wanting to go with a colored mortar – [to] give it more of a natural feel.

[The mockup] also gives us an opportunity to test out a lot of our caulking, so that we make sure we get the right color. These dental pieces here are very similar to the ones we looked at that the masons were laying under the eave. These larger pieces are more on the front facade. This section is what you'll see on the front facade. This cast stone detail here would be our statue pedestals for the transepts and the front facade.

All right, so as you can see the cupola is sheeted and almost complete. We do have an install date set – July 12th. You can look at our website at aNewImmaculata.org. We do have a live cam link you can view this from home if you're not local. If you are local, please feel free to come up to our observation deck and watch it. It may be a day or so after the 12th. We plan on sending out an update on our announcements, which you can sign up for on our website. So, thank you for your prayers and support of this project. And we'll give you an update in another month.