Abbey monastery renovation right on track
JASON LAWRENCE/DAILY FORUM
Conception Abbey Director of Environmental Services Mark Wiederholt shows off the new sinks and cabinets that are being added to each room of the monastery. The monastery is undergoing its first renovation since it was constructed in the 1880s.
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Six months into a $15 million renovation, the Conception Abbey monastery is around halfway complete — right where the Abbey hoped to be, according to Mark Wiederholt, the Abbey’s director of environmental services.
Demolition began in June, and now workers are in the process of putting walls and some of the new amenities into place.
“All the demo for the five floors has been completed. We’re probably about halfway as far as the putting things back,” Wiederholt said. “… We did the construction from the top down. We’re just now getting started putting standing walls up in the basement. Overall, I’d say we’re around 50 percent complete.
“The Abbey and I are really satisfied so far with where we’re at.”
Wiederholt added that the third floor is probably 70 percent complete while the second floor is about 60 percent done and the first 50 percent. The fourth floor is currently being used as storage for all of the furniture from the first three floors. Once the first three floors are finished, Wiederholt’s company, Wiederholt Construction, based out of Maryville, will come in and finish the fourth floor — one of many local companies that will play a role in the project.
The renovation is the first ever for the structure originally built in the 1880s, and despite its age, Wiederholt said there haven’t been too many surprises along the way.
“We really haven’t had a lot of, ‘Wow, we didn’t have any idea that was there’ things. There haven’t been any real big surprises,” he said. “Mostly, it’s been when you renovate a building that size, you just can’t get everything in the blueprints. There’s just so many details in a building like that. You do the best you can, so there is a considerable amount of things that need to be done as you run across them, but all-in-all those things have been getting taken care of.”
The biggest potential obstacles were taken care of in advance, from moving Conception Seminary College students to allow the monks to move into the dormitories and starting a capital campaign to raise money for the project.
A few years ago, the Abbey built a new guesthouse on campus in preparation for the ongoing renovation of the monastery, said Fr. Benedict Neenan, the Abbey’s business manager.
“We added some space on campus before we did the renovation so that we could shift folks around,” Fr. Benedict said. “We put students in an older guesthouse and we took some student housing (for the monks). We didn’t really lose much space because we had built the new guest house.”
Fr. Benedict added that the capital campaign is still ongoing and most of the money for the renovation has come in through fundraising, although donations are still being accepted through the Abbey’s development office. He said that the Abbey would take out a loan to finish the work, and then pay it off with money raised through the capital campaign.
“We’d be most grateful for any additional assistance,” Fr. Benedict said.
The monks who call the Abbey home vowed not to spend any of their regular budget on the upgrades, something very characteristic of them, Wiederholt said.
“This renovation has really been a long time coming,” Wiederholt said. “The men that lived here looked at this back in the 80s, back in the 70s. They never wanted to put themselves ahead of somebody else. They took care of the students when they renovated the administration building. They’re taking care of their guests. They were always putting the people in this community and surrounding area ahead of themselves. … It’s well deserved on their part even thought they would never ask for it.”
The project is on target to stay within that budgeted $15 million, Fr. Benedict said, crossing his fingers.
“There’s a lot of contingency built into that number, so I think we’ve got enough cushion that we can still hit that budget target,” he said.
They’re on target to hit their June 1 completion date, too, Wiederholt said.
“It can fluctuate a couple weeks either direction depending on supplies and when things show up,” he said. “I think we’re pretty well through all of the unforeseen things because we’re far enough along that all the walls have been opened up. … I foresee, and JE Dunn does as well, that we’re going to hit the target date and we always aim to try and get it in a little before the target date.”
Though the monks never asked for the renovation, they will have some serious upgrades in both amenities and safety once they return to their living quarters upon completion of the renovation.
The renovation will provide the monastery with such improvements as central air-conditioning, fire exits on every floor, an up-to-date fire alarm system, a sprinkler system, upgraded water and electrical systems and improved handicap accessibility, and there will be more rooms for monks as unused space was converted into living quarters for an additional 10-15 monks
“We’ve installed a lot of systems that will make the building much safer against fire danger,” Fr. Benedict said. “We’ll have more space for more monk rooms. Some of the older space that we had that we weren’t really using for storage or classrooms, we didn’t really need so we’ve divided those up into more rooms. We will have room for more monks, probably an additional 15 more monks that we can house now.
“They’ll have sinks in the rooms, at least some rooms will have bathrooms, so the amenities will be upgraded. All the systems will be new. … Instead of tinkering and fixing old systems again and again, we’ll have new systems.”
Not only will the renovation benefit the monks that call the Abbey home, it has benefitted, and will continue to benefit, the local economy until the project is completed. Wiederholt said a lot of local contractors were selected when awarding contracts for different aspects of the renovation.
“On any given day, there’s 300 people over there working,” Wiederholt said. “… Most of them come from St. Joe and up this way, and they’ve been here since the first of June. It is a benefit to those companies as well. If the decision had to made whether we went out of town or in town, we pretty much, if at all possible, always picked the contractor that was closest to here. That was important when we were going through the process.”
While Wiederholt said there aren’t many monasteries still standing in their original state — many have been lost to fires — with the upgrades being made, Wiederholt expects the renovation to last another 130 years.
JASON LAWRENCE/DAILY FORUM
The monastery, or monks’ residence, at Conception Abbey is undergoing its first renovation since it was first constructed in the 1880s. The renovation is approximately halfway done, according to Director of Environmental Services Mark Wiederholt, and on track to be done in June.
JASON LAWRENCE/DAILY FORUM
The second floor of the four-story monastery at Conception Abbey is nearing completion. The construction is at various levels depending on the floor, with the third floor nearly complete. The fourth floor is currently serving as storage and will completed after the first three floors are complete.
JASON LAWRENCE/DAILY FORUM
The walls of basement in the Conception Abbey monastery have yet to replaced. Local construction companies stripped the walls down to the concrete and added medal ties to keep the drywall from being reapplied to the brick. The entire building also got new heating and cooling systems as well as a sprinkler system to make it safer for the monks who reside there.
