Removing decades of dust and wax, crews are bringing new luster to a majestic Utah cathedral

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Being around water taught Jeremy Kelly Librett, a boat builder and former charter boat captain, a lot about wood — information he’s now putting to use in a restoration of the wood floor of Salt Lake City’s Cathedral of the Madeleine.

Librett is part of a three-member team — along with Bob Coutts and Tim Ciccone — working by hand on the restoration project, the first such endeavor undertaken at the majestic Roman Catholic cathedral in 30 years.

Patricia Wesson, director of development at the Cathedral, said she found Librett and offered the challenge of restoring the floor without sanding. Wesson has also raised the funds for the project.

“They originally waxed these floors back when they were put in in 1903,” said Librett, whose restoration experience includes work on the cathedral’s weather-beaten wooden front doors. “I mean, that’s what you would do with the beautiful wood floor: You’d wax them with beeswax [for] many, many years.”

Before the team started working, Librett said, the floor was essentially layers and layers of dark wax on top of light maple boards.

Restoring the floor is a 13-step process, he said, and removing the wax is the first step.

Crews use a heat gun to warm the wax until it bubbles. Then they take a scraper and start removing the wax, which peels off to the side in long, curling, dark ribbons.

Figuring out that method, Librett said, required some trial and error. “Whatever you were using to try and get this off,” he said, “the wax would gum it up so fast. You really couldn’t use any type of abrasive Scotch pad or something.”

Liquid wax removers were out, he said, because workers didn’t want to release any toxins. And Librett uses a sander that has its own vacuum cleaner, so the work produces no dust — a necessity to keep the cathedral’s towering organ from sucking dust into its massive pipes, said Father Martin Diaz, the cathedral’s rector.

Removing the wax by hand is time-consuming and detailed, Librett said. But, Diaz said, it’s necessary.

Under the cathedral’s master plan, which is used to monitor the renovations needed over the next five to 10 years, Diaz said, “We could close the church for four months, take out all the pews, and sand 1/16th of an inch, and that would bring it back.” The estimate for that plan, according to Diaz, was $600,000.

Librett took a look at the floors and proposed his method, which would allow his team to renovate the floor in sections permit the church to stay open throughout the project.

The estimate for Librett’s crew, Diaz said, started at $100,000, but the cost has grown to $300,000.

“One hundred years ago, people built a building, they had no idea of who we would be,” Diaz said. “They knew they were building something, certainly, for themselves … I don’t know who’s going to be here in 100 years, but our work today is so that they would have a place to worship 100 years from now.”

Crews started work on the floor last October. So far, they have completed the altar area and the cathedral’s center aisle. They also have started working on the back section, near the baptismal font. As they have worked, they have uncovered square inlays buried under the wax.

Construction of the Cathedral of the Madeleine was started in 1900 by the Salt Lake City diocese’s first Catholic bishop, Irish immigrant Lawrence Scanlan, according to the cathedral’s website. Completing the building took nine years and $344,000 — or about $12 million in today’s dollars. Scanlan’s successor, Bishop Joseph S. Glass, oversaw the addition of the colorful interior decor in 1915.

Cathedral renovations, Diaz said, are constant, and there are always things to fix or improve. In Diaz’s tenure, he said, work has been done on the air conditioning, the heating system and the sealing on the roof’s edges. Workers even changed the building’s interior lights to LEDs, because incandescent light can age the murals.

The last time the floor was restored was in 1993, part of a sweeping two-year renovation and restoration — the most extensive in the cathedral’s history — that cost $9.7 million, according to the building’s history.

When discussing renovations, Diaz said, “We don’t use the word ‘immediate.’ Immediate would mean a brick is going to fall on your head.”

Diaz pointed to the pews, installed before the cathedral’s completion in 1909. “Because people now wear jeans that have these brads on them, we have gouges in our pews,” Diaz said. “So our pews need to be renovated, but they’re not going to fall down, right?”

The master plan also considers church funds, Diaz said. Renovation money comes from donations, grants and the diocese — and in a building that’s been in operation for 114 years, the costs can add up.

The project’s next phase is to restore the floor under the pews, which remain sturdy and heavy to lift. “We’re gonna take out two at a time,” Librett said, “and work our way up, but it’s all hard.”

Librett’s team works weekdays, between events — weddings, funerals and regular church services. Because of that, there’s no exact end date for the project, though Librett estimated it will take another year to 18 months.

Crews will try to get as much done before what Librett called “the busy season” — from Christmas to late spring, when Salt Lake City’s Catholic high schools flock to the cathedral for graduation Masses.

“I’m hoping that [Librett] finishes before Jesus comes back,” Diaz said, smiling.

“We try to do it to the standard as if we were doing someone’s living room,” Librett said. “It’s really been important. It’s [a] worthwhile effort. It’s a big change.”

Diaz said, “100 years from now, 50 years from now, people will look at that floor, at those pews, and they’ll have no idea. They won’t remember what we did. But they’ll be using them.”

The whirl of construction tools on a recent rainy morning added to the sensory experience of the cathedral — along with the concentrated echoes in the cavernous space, the heavy smell of incense and the colors of the paintings and stained-glass windows.

At 11:30 a.m., two Salt Lake Trolley sightseeing tour buses stopped in front of the cathedral — which is a Utah Historic Site and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Forty tourists poured out of the buses and into the grand building, phones held up to snap photos, necks craned to glance at the ceiling, awe in their eyes.

In the back corner, Coutts put on his mask and got back to work.

Diaz said he still gets joy from watching people come into the cathedral for the first time.

“The idea of a church is to lift our minds and hearts to God,” Diaz said, “that the grandeur of a church, or the mountains or anything like that, is for us to get outside of ourselves and realize, ‘Hey, there is something greater.’”