• 
• CLASS
• JOBS
• AUTO
• HOMES

Janesville business sets reverent tone for sacred worship

Photo Gallery

Church Restoration

View Gallery

JANESVILLE — Michael L. Smith has found his calling.

It’s renovating churches.

The 48-year-old Janesville native has orchestrated more than 50 church projects in addition to other historic building projects nationwide, including the Stoughton Opera House.

Smith Renovations specializes in interior scaffolding, plaster repair, painting, decorating with gold leaf and wood refinishing.

“It’s everything from A to Z inside the church,” Smith said.

He started in the business after leaving the Army; a veteran representative helped him get a job with a Kenosha church design business. He worked there for eight years.

Smith started his own company in 1999.

It’s a centuries-old profession, Smith said, and “We’re the new kid on the block.”

Even so, congregations are hiring him.

“They see I enjoy what I do, and perhaps that I’m more concerned with quality than profit,” Smith said.

The profession is waning, and Smith is one of only a few renovators remaining.

The more skilled craftsmen he gets to know, the more he can do, he said. Carpenters, architects, artists and liturgical consultants from around the country work with Smith in crews of two to 15.

“We have a vast diversity of denominational backgrounds attached to the company,” Smith said.

Last month, Smith and his crew were contracted by Emmanuel Lutheran Church in downtown Rockford, Ill. The job was to remove and reinstall 48 religious-symbol canvas panels that were 70 years old and hung 40 feet high.

Their first task was to erect a work platform of steel-pipe scaffolding. That took a week.

Then Smith’s crew had to find a way to make the replacement panels fit because the manufacturer had made them too small. His crew added furring strips to widen mullions accented by 127-year-old decorative oak trim.

“There’s always a struggling point in each project,” Smith said.

He has led projects in small country churches and large Cathedrals. Projects have ranged from $10,000 to $2 million.

Among his most memorable jobs is the Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church in Bremerton, Wash.

When he walked into the dark, narrow Gothic-style church, he immediately saw possibilities. He took pictures and measurements to create a proposal, but he struggled with a design to replace a narrow, angled arch in the sanctuary.

“It looked awkward,” he said.

But at 3 one morning, he got the idea of adding a column to each side of the arch to round its angles to mirror the circular stained glass window behind it.

“From there,” Smith said, “everything else fell in place.”

When the five-month, multi-million-dollar project was done, it became one of his proudest professional moments.

“It was very rewarding to look at what you create,” he said.

That includes his designs for the furnishings—altar, pulpit and a cross made of Italian marble.

While Smith’s crew recently worked at soaring heights of the scaffolding, their master craftsmanship took on an otherworldly glow from the sun shining through the stained-glass windows.

The results are, according to Smith’s Web site, “an environment that sets a reverent tone for sacred worship.”