Off With the Old

The building was used as an LDS chapel until the mid 70's.  (It still has the same orange-gold carpet to prove it.)  During that time every president of the church from Brigham Young to David O. McKay spoke in the chapel.

At one time it was used as a mortuary.  Only for funerals and viewings, they did not do any embalming or body preparation there.  After that two other families owned the building and used it as a residence but no one ever did anything much with chapel.  Although all the stained glass is gone and all but one of the benches in the chapel are gone, the chapel organ is still there though.  There was a class room wing added to the chapel in either the 40's or 50's.  The Sunday school room on the east end of the wing has been turned into a two bed room apartment along with one of the class rooms.  So there has been a lot of projects started and stopped, the plumbing and electrical in the basement show the proof of that.  Yes it has a basement that goes under about 2/3 of the class room wing.  Aside from having relics left from its old coal fired boiler for heating days days like a coal room and the old plate steel and cast iron doors for the furnace, it has 10 foot ceilings.

The first project that need to be handled was and is repairing the damage to the exterior adobe brick walls of he chapel.

We checked with Utah Historical Society to find out what would be an acceptable to repair the walls and still retain its historical status.  We found that since it has a stucco finish, the damaged adobe could be replaced with cinder block and then stuccoed over as long as we retain the original look of the building.

The next problem was finding a contractor that would be willing to take on the project.  I took pictures and emailed a dozen contractors that did stuff sort of like this or said their web sites.  None of them replied back.  Finally, again the Historical Society, I got a hold of Abstract Masonry, who specialize in historic masonry restoration.  They along with Ensign Engineering started to do some exploratory work to see what they were up against.  After ward we were able to breath a little easier when they came back with their findings.  The walls are 32" thick adobe and the adobe brick is unusually hard.  The foundation is about 42" thick and 48" high with about 36" under ground and was made of hard stone that was not prone to easy deterioration.  Also the wall had already been repaired, twice we later found out, with cinder block.

Unfortunately, all the aspens along the west wall had to come down for the construction, they were also suspected in the cause of the one of the problems, too much watering and adobe/mud brick do not mix.  The engineer also wanted supports in side the chapel to hold the roof up just in case.

Then the damaged adobe and the old cinder block came down.