It’s 0635 a.m. on a wet and chilly Friday morning and I’m sitting at my temporary desk in Tucker Hall looking across the array of tables and filing cabinets, where the accounting office has taken up temporary residence, to a grey* and misty Witchduck Road. Why am I here you may ask? Let me tell you……..
Last Tuesday, 16 February, a willing band of brothers and sister (Ned Kuhns, Diane Miller and I) executed the long-awaited move of the accounting offices from their familiar spot in the office corridor to their temporary billet in Tucker Hall. You will recall the area in Tucker just outside the kitchen doors where there’s tiling on the floor so it’s okay to spill coffee, tea and anything else that might stain a carpet? That has now been transformed into an open plan office space to provide temporary housing for the Parish Administrator, accounting and your blogging correspondent leaving the office corridor empty of inhabitants so it can be refurbished. Many thanks to Dave Wilkinson for bringing the miracle of IT to all of us into Tucker Hall, so the beating heart of regular ODEC business can continue unabated, and thanks to everyone else who helped the accounting office prepare for their move. In the pictures above I’ve tried to capture the “operational-look” of Tucker Hall, might strike a note with anyone who has served in the military and been on deployment! That’s the background, now let’s fast forward to bright and early this morning, 19 Feb, that saw me heading up the road at an hour I had, since retirement, forgotten even existed to be on the ground in Tucker Hall to meet Scott Crumley and prepare for the arrival of the work “crew,” due in at 0700 a.m. This “crew” will, over the next two or three days, be stripping the old carpet, tiles and assorted glues from the floors in the corridor, the offices and the printer/copier room. To do this the “crew” will also have to shuffle furniture, file cabinets and sundry items around the spaces so they can get at the offending floors, rather like that game where you move little tiles around a small, framed board until they align into a picture or well know phrase. Just after 0700 a.m. and the “crew,” a band of three, is on site. I really don’t envy them, shuffling all the kit and caboodle around is a big enough job in itself but adding to that the task of lifting carpet and then hand scraping off the underlying glue is quite a mission. Then, of course, there’s the debris to be disposed of, not just pieces of carpet but also the plastic tiles under the carpet and then flakes of glue under that. It’s 0710 a.m. and time to give the “crew” a quick briefing on what they can and can’t do. The “can” is easy, they can do anything they like in the corridor and offices, it’s their space for the next few days. The “can’t” is straightforward as well, they can’t take anything that’s covered in dust out of the corridor into the rest of the building, that narrows their options down to the contents of Mother Ashley’s office where, rather wisely, the door has been kept closed so everything is dust free. 0830 a.m. and the “crew” are hard at it. What remains of the carpet in the Angel’s office is already gone, all of the cardboard boxes in the corridor (mostly the contents of Father Bob’s shelves) have been stacked back on the shelves and shrouded in plastic sheeting, the Parish Admin office is empty and more plastic sheeting is being used to seal off the area. It’s time to leave the “crew” to do what they do best and take a short “blogging browse” elsewhere. The rear wing has, as you may know, been waiting for its ceiling tiles and carpet for some time and in this past week that time arrived. Ceiling tiles have been hung and carpet installed, and the result is quite spectacular. Aside from the new accounting office suit there are four spaces in the rear wing. Three of these spaces are rooms of varying sizes, each well-lit with natural light and each offering the promise of a multitude of uses from the small meeting or educational event to the largest room that could easily host a function. The fourth space is the toddler and nursey room divided in two so the cribs have a dedicated area of their own. In each room there is a wall that picks out a colour from the carpet that gives it all a very professional look. Back to the “crew,” it’s just after midday as I sit at my temporary desk, looking across the temporary open plan office to the back of Diane Miller’s (permanent) head as she works her fiscal magic in the accounting office’s temporary area. Down the corridor from Tucker the “crew” have the office corridor tightly sealed off with dire notices warning the casual bystander to stay away. From the depths of the corridor the sound of scraping can be heard, a sure sign that the “crew” are hard at it but exactly what that “it” is I can’t rightly say because I’m just a casual bystander! Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach. "Grey" Brit for gray!
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As the Flanders and Swan song goes, this week it has been a case of “Mud, mud, glorious mud.”* A very good week to have your wellies* at the ready in the boot* of the car and your best, weather proof coat to hand. Being out and about on the construction site this week has not been a pleasant experience, lashing rain, “a lazy wind*” and temperatures hovering above freezing but even so the construction show must, and does, go on!
Even with the inclement weather, progress has been made on completing the roof on Tucker Hall, on the brickwork around the Great Hall, which is gradually rising either side of the palladium windows, and on Wednesday the HVAC mechanical units were hoisted onto the new flat roof for installation by Atlantic Heating and Air. Inside the Great Hall and narthex, the roofing framing and the HVAC conduits were inspected and approved by a City Inspector and the store front glass was installed either side of the main doors so now the Hall and narthex are not only dry but also weather tight! Last week I blogged about the challenge of integrating the new construction with the existing buildings, not just the roofing, utilities or even the structural bones but also to give easy passage for us humans to move throughout the buildings. I’ve discovered, from hanging around on the site and picking up the odd tip, these new passages also serve the secondary purpose of “hiding” the joints between the existing and new so it doesn’t look like the rear wing and narthex were just “bolted on after the fact” but rather as if they were always meant to be there. So, if you were to walk with me from the narthex we would pass through a single set of fire doors into a short “crosswalk,” that used to be the small vestibule between the main doors, and there we would be, standing in the corridor outside Tucker Hall. If you were to continue walking with me down the corridor passing the kitchen door on the left, restrooms on the right moving towards the day school wing it would all look very familiar……that is until we arrived at the courtyard. As you may know from bygone blogs the rotten, wooded doors and windows have already been replaced, so not too much of a surprise there, but if we were to turn our backs to the courtyard we might be a little taken aback to see that the old library is now two thirds of its original size and the tiny passage that used to lead to the back door has now metamorphosed into a fine, wide passage to the new rear wing. Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach “Mud, mud, glorious mud,” “The Hippopotamus Song,” Flanders and Swan 1960 “wellies” colloquial English for rubber boots “boot” what we Brits call the trunk of the car – not to be confused with boot as in a wellie boot! “a lazy wind” what my old Mum (Brit speak for Mom) used to call a biting, freezing breeze that cut through you because it was too lazy to go around you. Another week goes by on the construction site and once again the amount of progress offers such a variety of choice to a blogger (yes after all these blogs I have decided to drop the “novice” caveat) it is difficult to know where to start. In this blog I am going to look at what is happening to the interior of the existing buildings but first a quick “blogging gallop” around the outside. Despite the slightly inclement weather, we have reached some significant milestones. The narthex entrances on both the Old Church and the Withduck sides of the building have doors! Yes, real doors you can open and walk through, of course it is true that on the Old Church side you could just as easily walk through the spaces where the store front glass will go but even that will soon be installed. The other big milestone, at least for me, is the installation of the little semi-circulars of glass that top off the palladium windows, each glass now surrounded by an arch of Flemish Bond pattern brickwork (if you’re wondering what that is please cast you eye over the previous blog), it really is most pleasing to the eye but now let’s cut to the chase and take a look inside. You may recall the plan to refurbish what I call the “Office Corridor,” that part of the existing building where our Clergy, accountants, the Parish Administrator and the Duty Angel have their respective offices. Some while ago Father Bob and Mother Ashley vacated their offices and Gretchen Hood decamped down the corridor to share that little room where I was a part time occupant. Well now Gretchen and your correspondent have moved out of the corridor to take up temporary residence in Tucker Hall. Father Bob is continuing as the “Rector-Of-No-Fixed-Office,” Mother Ashely is operating from her home and as soon as possible the accounting office will also decamp to Tucker to leave the corridor without occupants. Once fully vacated the refurbishment can begin with removal of the furniture, kit and caboodle all to be stored in Tucker, then the floors will be stripped, walls painted, and new carpet laid. When I’m not playing at building project manager I like to tinker with an old sports car and it being British it has an endearing, and at times very frustrating, selection of Whitworth, Imperial and Metric sized nuts and bolts and you can guarantee I never pick up the right spanner* to work on the car. Imagine that little confusion multiplied a thousand times, and you will get an idea of what Scott Crumley encounters many times everyday as he wrestles with the challenge of integrating the new buildings with the old. I’ve blogged about some of those challenges before, there was the roof with its different heights, the odd angles, joining flat areas to pitched roofing and then there was the electrical system to say nothing of the sewers and drains. This week the focus has been on starting to connect the Narthex to the passage outside Tucker Hall and the rear wing to what was the back of the existing building (where the door leading out to Alfriend House used to be) all bring new problems for Scott to solve. Remember the set of double doors you needed a generous soul to hold open if you ever had the misfortune of trying to enter the building when your arms were full? Those doors are no more, removed this very day by the small husband and wife demo team who, when I left the site, had moved on to taking out the little vestibule enclosed by those doors so construction can begin to make the ceilings level, fill the voids* between the walls (get me, tossing around building terminology like I know what I’m talking about), and integrate the floors all necessary to seamlessly connect the old and the new. Remember the old library where meetings used to be held and every week counters used to do their counting. The old library is no more and that little passage with its sloping floor to the back door is gone. The old library wall where the bookcases and cupboards stood has been demolished and now you can cross into the back wing, albeit whilst navigating around trip hazards and, at least today, another one of Scott’s demo-teams. This “knock through” is no simple task, if you remove about eight feet of supporting wall without due caution there is a good chance some of the new roof will join you and become even more of a trip hazard, although that would probably be the least of your woes. So, like pit-props in a mine, the demo team has set in place wooden props to support the roof until a new weight bearing steel beam is installed to take up the weighty burden. Way back in the very beginning of the rear wing’s construction the bricklayers built a fire wall outside the library, it stands about a foot off from the existing brick wall. This construction has left a void (there I go again) and walking from the existing building, through the recent demolition and into the rear wing you can still see that void and even look up into the new roofing frames. Glancing to the right as you pass the void you can see one of the scupper’s down pipes, that used to carry away rainwater from the old flat roof, still attached to the brick wall. The void will be closed off when the new corridor is completed and I was struck by the thought that maybe one day, far off in the future, a group of parishioners might have cause to open the void for their own new building project and there they will find that old down pipe and scupper standing as a testament to the work we have undertaken. Perhaps a testament of great interest to a future Historic Traditions commission? I’d like to think so. Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach. “Spanner” Brit speak for a wrench. “Void” Not Brit speak this time, these voids are small gaps or spaces in the walls that are sealed off in the final construction. |
AuthorDavid Beach is our Building Project Manager, and has been an active part of our parish family for more than a decade. He is retired from NATO and the British Army and is a joy and blessing to all of us. Archives
July 2021
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