Window Salvage

Workers from Jacksonville Art Glass carefully remove and crate the stained glass from St. Francis Xavier Church for restoration and installation. Prayers with the people of the former St. Francis Parish!

Week 1 Friday update

Excavation for east footings. Will need to be inspected, then filled with a layer of rock, then concrete footings. 

De-watering pumps are working away! There's already a noticeable difference, but how long it will take to make the deep excavation possible is anyone's guess. Work remains focused on the east end until then.

De-watering wells

Richardsville Drilling dropping the first of three de-watering wells

Continuing excavation on the west end, where the mechanical vault will be, requires some de-watering. This is accomplished by drilling wells and pumping down the water table. We're drilling three wells today and will get that started. It's hard to predict how long it will take to dry things up enough to work, so we'll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, excavation and foundation work can proceed on the west end of the building, which is much shallower.

While it would have been ideal to avoid the necessity of de-watering, it was a contingency we expected and planned for. There is a considerable amount of money in the budget for exactly this. The bottom line is that excavation and foundation needs remain the highest-risk phase of the project, in terms of possible complications. But the status so far is that, while we aren't exactly seeing our best-case scenario, we haven't run into anything we haven't planned for.

Excavating Lake Kateri

Trucking by Hish Farms and Payne Farms... Thank you!  We're obviously hitting some water and soft sand. Not exactly a surprise; it can be dealt with. Don't fall in though.