"Be devoted to Our Blessed Lady and you will have the grace of final perseverance."
- Saint Philip Neri
Although many things were accomplished in 2004, one could fairly say we spent much of the year building Our Lady's Bell Tower. The tower is 80 feet tall, and its lower levels serve as the stairwell for the north end of the monastery, connecting the church to the residence. The fourth floor of the tower is the ringer's chamber, and directly above it is the bell chamber with its large arched windows. A steel spiral stair over forty feet tall allows one to climb from the floor of the ringer's chamber all the way through the bell chamber to the roof deck.
Each floor of the tower has concrete corner columns nearly one and a half feet square, supporting a ring beam of similar dimensions, which in turn supports an eight inch thick concrete floor. 
The aerated concrete block fills in between the columns, forming the walls. The thick limestone veneer is well tied to the structure of the tower, and with the window sill and jamb stones made to span from the outer wall face to the inner, covers the inner core of concrete.
We had the help of a crane on a few occasions, mostly when we were pouring the concrete columns and floors of the tower, but most of the stone was lifted in a more creative way. Whereas in the Middle Ages hoisting would have been accomplished with animal power (usually oxen), we used electricity.
Thern, Inc. very generously gave us a construction winch, which we mounted to a beam that was laid atop the scaffolding. Stones were hoisted as high as our forklift would reach, then wheeled around the scaffold on a dolly, where the winch could pick them up, and then lifted straight up onto their place in the wall. 
The winch was easily moved around the tower as the work proceeded. A crane would not have done any better since only so many courses of stone can be set in a day (otherwise the mortar will squeeze out), so the winch suited the pace of work very nicely.
Building methods have changed rather dramatically in the last few centuries, and yet in building stone arches there has been little improvement on the original method: build a wooden falsework to the shape of the arch, set the falsework in place on shoring, and then lay the stones, spacing them with wooden wedges, on top of the falsework, using the wooden form as a guide to keep the radius of the arch true.
By late fall we had finished the tower up to the top of the bell chamber windows, and while we awaited delivery of the stone for the parapet and pinnacles, we began the stone work on the west end of the church.
The west door was completed at the end of the year, and in January of 2005 work began on the rose window, just above the west door. The rose window was a different challenge, since to build the circular opening our semicircular wooden form first had to be suspended from a beam, and the jamb stones for the bottom half of the circle pushed up until they touched the form all around. Then the form was turned right side up and the stones for the top half of the circle were laid in the usual way, resting on the falsework.
After the perimeter of the circle was complete, we removed the large form and began to lay the stones that separate the petals one from the other. Small plywood forms in the shape of the petals were used to keep the stone openings regular so the window frames would all be the same size.
The rest of the west wall was soon finished, the coping stones installed on the gable, and the cross set on the gable peak. By the end of winter we had completed the stonework on the west, north and south (facing the cloister) walls, just as the container of stone with the parapet and pinnacles for the tower arrived.
We had the expert assistance of Lynchburg Crane to help us install the pinnacles, since we had run out of scaffolding, and could no longer raise our winch high enough to work the topmost stones above the tower roof deck.
With the pinnacles installed, we were finally able to take down the scaffold around the tower which had stood for so long, giving us our first view of a finished stone wall.
We next turned our attention to the stuccoing of the residence. The church, bell tower and cloister are the only parts of the monastery which are faced in limestone. The rest of the building is finished with a stucco designed specifically for the lightweight aerated concrete block. Because this cement-based stucco and the block have a similar density, they expand and contract at the same rate, and the risk of the stucco cracking is greatly reduced. The color is already in the finish coat, so no painting is necessary.