Work in the basement of the church in Stilesville

6 February 2025

We are currently doing renovations in the basement of the church in Stilesville in order to add a few bedrooms and also a bathroom for seminarians who should join our community in the future.

The plan is to have 4 bedrooms in the basement. But this will not be possible immediately. First, we will have two bedrooms, because we need to keep our kitchen and classroom until we hopefully one day enlarge the church. There were some rooms down there already, but we had infiltrations of water and mold, a low ceiling and carpet. Not ideal. The new roof and gutters which we did last summer helped deal with the infiltration.

We will reduce the size of the bathroom that is available to the Faithful in the basement and also the electrical room. Between the bathroom and electrical room, a new bathroom will be added which will be for seminarians. It will include a shower. From that bathroom, we will be able to access the electrical room. Prior to that, the electrical room was only accessible from a bedroom, which is not ideal, obviously. We will have to change the original sump-pump which was leaking, in order to prevent bad smells to invade the basement.

We will take advantage of the renovations to increase the height of the ceiling. Up to now, a portion of the windows were above the ceiling. We really had the impression of being in a basement. The old beams of the church will remain visible, which will be a nice design for the bedroom. This will imply some modification to the ducts heating the church. We should be able to do it ourselves at a low cost.

As we were doing demolition, we discovered a large crack under one of the windows, which explains why we had water leaks in the basement. This has been corrected.

Each of the two bedrooms should be large enough for a seminarian to live a decent life. Outside of the bedrooms, what used to be the sewing room will be used for large closets for extra sacristy storage, as this is becoming an issue. The storage for the bookstore will also be there and there will probably be an altar as well for when we receive visiting priests.

Also, when entering the church, there was a wall and a door down to the basement and the area where we would put our coats and boots was not well designed, and we would loose a lot of space for nothing. This should also be corrected with this renovation.

All of this is a bit of work, but it will overall help complete our renovations of the church. When we purchased the church in 2020, we renovated the main floor in its entirety. Last year (2024) we did the library. This year will be the old basement. There will remain only the vestibule and back emergency exit which will be in need of a good painting and probably a new floor. One thing at the time… Our church is going to be at its full functioning capacity after that. Each square foot is used for something.

Living in renovations is not easy when you have to carry on with daily life. The library is a bit of a mess as we have to move everything there. But patience is key and life should be easier after that.

We count on your patience as the parish life is also affected by this.