I would never have made it as a journalist, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, but fortunately in Gretchen “The Scoop” Hood I have an alert reporter adept at describing what I’ve missed.
It was a slow Tuesday on the ODEC news front. The Day School Kindergarten class room was basking in all its glory with new paint, new ceiling and new lights – true it is still missing a window but then what a wonderful project for the kindergarten kids to get their teeth into when they get back to school! On the front lot the sand pad for the Great Hall and Narthex was finished and that very morning had passed the geo compression test (as those of you who follow my ramblings about the rear wing construction will know passing that test is the prelude to digging and pouring footings) and Ryan, our Higgerson site supervisor, was putting the site into shape before departing to “constructions new” (more on this later). Your correspondent, having toured the site in the morning was doing what married retired chaps are supposed to do by working through a home to-do-list (I lie like a cheap NAAFI watch*, I was actually inspecting the inside of my eye lids* on a sun lounger) when the text came through from Gretchen “The Scoop” Hood, “hold the front page of the blog, the ODEC vehicle sand trials have just begun!” The finished Great Hall and Narthex sand pad covers much of what used to be the old carpark and is approximately 2 feet high all around, (harping back to the rear wing construction again the sand pad aficionados amongst us will know the height of the sand has to be 4 inches below final floor level to accommodate the concrete pour for the finished floor), in a nutshell we are not talking “kids on the beach sand castle from a bucket mold” here, oh no, we are talking about a large and, what many of us would assume to be, very noticeable sand dune. Well apparently that’s not so, early Tuesday afternoon an Amazon delivery driver in an Enterprise Rental, Ford Transit Van turned into at what used to be the old car park entrance, skillfully avoided the traffic cones and drove onto the sand pad. The driver, realizing a Ford Transit Van has very limited capabilities in sand, started to execute a desperate “u turn” in an ill judged attempt to get back onto terra firma with little success. Transit Vans are real transport workhorses, seen on roads the world over and in that's the rub, “road” is the key word as our intrepid delivery driver was dismayed to discover when his van gracefully settled axle deep in construction sand. Gretchen, Father Bob and Ryan gathered to survey the scene, Ryan rightly declined to pull the van out with one of the big yellow machines, I’m going to miss them, so it was over to Enterprise Van Hire to do the recovery. My Father was a WW2 North African Desert Campaign veteran and I well remember me getting the family car stuck on Pentewan Sands* (actually “in Pentewan Sands” is more accurate) on a rising tide and him telling me that “I got it there it was my job to dig it out!” Enterprise Van Hire are more forgiving than my old Dad and after some wait the recovery was expedited and one humbled Amazon deliver driver was, I am sure, very glad to put ODEC in the rear view mirror as he got away down the road. Not quite the end of this saga, you will recall me saying the pad was finished – well after the Transit Van's attentions now not so much. A Ford Transit Van driven by a cove* ever more desperate to avoid getting stuck really cuts up your sand pad so it was fortunate that Ryan, the Higgerson Site Supervisor, was still there and to a professional like Ryan the destruction caused by a Ford Transit Van to his sand pad was but a mere bagatelle and certainly nothing that a few passes with a heavy roller wouldn’t fix. With pad fixed and extra bollards strategically placed to stop any more “vehicular vandals” from doing donuts on our pad, Ryan followed the rest of his Higgerson’s crew to pastures new! It’s bitter-sweet to see Ryan and his team leave the campus, they have been with us since the last tree was felled but for now their work is done so their departure marks a major milestone in the construction. We have not seen the last of Higgerson for once the Great Hall is constructed Higgerson, perhaps it might even be Ryan, will return to dig the last of the three storm water retention tanks, complete the vehicle entrances/exists and lay the new parking areas but for now it’s “so long, been good to know you!” Stay safe, stay healthy, David Beach “Lie like a cheap NAAFI watch”: British Army slang, the NAAFI was the equivalent to the US Armed Forces PX and it was widely believed among the British troops that certain NAAFI “luxury goods” were not quite as reliable as one might have hoped so a cheap watch purchased from the NAAFI was, in the opinion of the troops, likely to keep bad time hence “to lie like a cheap NAAFI watch” was a nod to not being able to trust a watch from the NAAFI. “Inspecting the inside of my eye lids”: British Army slang for having a nap “Pentewan Sands”: Pentewan is a small seaside village on the south coast of the County of Cornwall in the South West of England blessed with a very large, sandy beach. “Cove”: Old English for a person.
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“You see him here, you see him there, you see Scott Crumley everywhere!”*
Scott’s presence on the construction site is a great barometer for judging progress and in this past week he has been everywhere; Tucker Hall – he is there, kindergarten class room – he is there, out the front with Higgerson, the site contractors, and there he is again! It has definitely been a very busy week around the construction site. So, what's been going on? I'll start by shining the “blog spotlight” into the bowels of the day school wing where the kindergarten classroom is getting a makeover. Why a makeover? Well with the advent of a rear wing much of the classroom’s external wall has become an internal wall and with that windows and through wall air-conditioning units have had to be removed. I am rapidly learning remodeling is all about cause and effect, take out the windows so you need better lighting, take out the through wall air-conditioning units and you need to demolish the old ceiling to put in a new one so air-con ducts can be installed and central air brought to the room. The ceiling demolition was something to behold, no flashy machines or fancy tools for this man and woman team as they took down what turned out to be over 7000 pounds of ceiling structure, each pound removed by hand, loaded into a wheel barrow and wheeled to the waiting skip*. With demo “done and dusted”* the team installing the new drop ceiling did their thing each, quite literally, a giant of their profession as they worked around the room on stilts (I’m told this is quite normal for ceiling work so I must have had a sheltered life because I have never seen such a thing before)! With day school starting in September the race is on to install new lights, replace the missing window and the wall painted. Meanwhile Higgerson have been very busy connecting the new storm water retention tank to the new drainage system so although the rain may fall ODEC’s temporary pleasure lake is now, hopefully, a thing of the past. And it hasn’t all been about the drainage system, to my great delight the big yellow machines, warning buzzers chirping away like a bunch of cicadas, have been rumbling around the site gradually raising the sand pad that will, in time, be the base for the Great Hall and Narthex concrete floors. Readers of this blog may have picked up a slight vibe from me about the very large, heavy roller. In a nutshell I’d very much like to have a go at driving the machine and even more so now I’ve discovered the roller actually vibrates to better compress the sand. If you happen to be sitting in the office wing, as I was, and the roller goes into vibration mode when it’s just outside Father Bob’ office then then you could be very easily be fooled into thinking N. Witchduck Road had just become an earthquake zone! Of course, I speak as a Brit with little earthquake experience! There is much to look forward to in the coming weeks, footings and concrete floor for the Great Hall/Narthex and roof trusses for the back wing but in the meantime.... Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach. “You see him here, you see him there….”: adapted by me from “The Scarlet Pimpernel” by Baroness Emma Orczy “Skip”: English terminology for a “dumpster” “done and dusted”: English colloquial slang for finishing something This week the construction site has been plagued by rain, rain and even more rain to the point of looking like The Netherlands on a wet Sunday afternoon (and having lived there for 3 years I know what I’m talking about!). We even had our own version of “The Little Dutch Boy who put his finger in the dyke” in the form of Shirley the Sexton for although she might not go down in myth as the savor of Haarlem* she did fight back the waters as it sneaked under the door in her utility area!
The deluge caught out Higgerson, the site contractor, who were waiting for the delivery of about 20 feet of piping (the blue 12 inch variety for those “pipe-spotters” among us) so they could connect the newest storm water retention tank to the storm water management system. The pipes did arrive on Thursday morning but unfortunately, they were really needed on Wednesday afternoon so much of Thursday was taken up with pumping out the car park, entrance drive and the flooded tank much to the chagrin of Larry and Ryan. I keep asking them if they are “living the dream,” they always answer to the affirmative but this past week I’m not so convinced! Well enough tales of the ODEC recreational lake, what else has been “going down” (or perhaps filling up is more appropriate?). Not much news from the back of the site. The framing and yellow, sheeting water barrier, the latter well tested this week and they appear to work correctly, have survived intact and we wait with bated breath for the roofing work to start. Meanwhile when not waiting for the site to dry out Higgerson have installed the missing pipework, so now the flooding should be abated, and completely ripped up the old car park and surrounding area in readiness for the start of building the Great Hall and Narthex sand pad. As you may recall from the rear wing’s construction it is critical that the ground under the sand pad is completely dry before they start to build what will be the biggest sandcastle on N. Witchduck Road you’ll see this Summer! The word from Ryan is with a dry weekend sand pad building could start as early as Tuesday next week (18 Aug), with pad in place and compression tested it will be time to dig the trenches for the footings then, to my great joy, it will be “concrete pouring time” once again, first for the footings and then the big pour for the floor and hopefully another opportunity to get reacquainted with the concrete floor leveling team. Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach “the savor of Haarlem”: the myth has it that a little boy was walking along one of the Netherland’s many earth dykes when he came across a jet of water springing from a small hole in the side of the dyke. The little boy put his finger in the hole to prevent the dyke from collapsing and thereby saved the city of Haarlem. I’m sure Higgerson would tell us earth banks holding back water crack open so the little boy would have had a tough time! Four major events on the construction site this week; 1) Isaias wandered past 2) walls appearing on the rear wing, 3) the entrance to Tucker Hall got a makeover 4) it rained (again). So let’s start with the weather! Well it’s been a damp old week (English art of the understatement) but apart from littering the Campus with tree debris and flooding the car park area everything on the construction site seems to have ridden out the tempests. Nothing was blown down, washed away or left sticking out of a wall or window, all-in-all “a bit of a result!”* Once again, our fledgling storm water management system proved its worth and when it’s extended around the old car park we should see an end to flooding in that area as well. Meanwhile between the patches of inclement weather the wheels of construction quite literally continued to turn. The framing out of the rear wing is nearly complete and so the focus has been on attaching the sheeting that provides a water barrier behind the outside walls, as you may recall from the architect’s renderings the rear wing will be finished in brick. Now this sheeting is not to be trifled with, it’s yellow about an inch thick and, as I discovered when I tried to pick up an off cut, is deceptively heavy!! Whilst seeing the rear wing start to take shape the big story of the week must be “demolition” and I think we are now “past the point of no return!” A couple of blogs ago I mentioned our intention to accelerate the building work in the front and as we well know you have to break down before you can build up and that’s manifestly obvious with the removal of the entrance to Tucker Hall. Plants, bushes, small trees, asphalt, paving, columns and the porch are all gone and now the only way into the building is through the Day School entrance. So what can we look forward to in the coming weeks? Work will continue on the rear wing with the walls soon to be followed by the roof construction. At the front Higgerson will complete the storm water management system, albeit leaving the middle storm-water retention tank until after the main construction on the Great Hall is completed, and once that is done work will begin on preparing the front area for the footings and, eventually, pouring the concrete floor so we can look forward to the return of concrete trucks, concrete pumps and, of course, the concrete team! Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach “a bit of a result”: a good outcome What a very active week on the ODEC Campus! A great quantity of earth has been moved, the rear wing has been picked out in a steel lattice and the Historic Church has been prepared for the arrival of its new audio/visual system. Where to start? Well let’s kick off* with my favorite topic, moving earth! Ryan and his Higgerson team (featured in the above photo) have been hard at it this past week and making good use of the wide array of heavy, yellow equipment to excavate the storm water bio retention tank #1. The new tank is where the old herb garden used to be and unlike tank #3, which is located between Tucker Hall and N. Witchduck Rd and was the first to be dug, this tank is designed to support vehicles because it will be under the new main access and parking area. This is a big tank, filled once again with the plastic milk crates (our onsite supply is dwindling fast) and, as regular readers will know, is already connected by a temporary pipe line to the Tucker Hall tank and thence onto the Chesapeake Bay water catchment area. In the coming week, the effectiveness of our storm water management system could well be put to the test as Isaias passes through our area. Meanwhile great things have happened around the back. Just a week ago the steel framing for the rear wing began and here we are but a few days later and “voilà”* the external and internal walls, the doors and windows are all picked out in a web of steel. If you stand looking through the framing around the back door in your mind’s eye you can see the rooms and offices filled with staff, parishioners and children all going about God’s business. And it’s not just about framing, where the new wing shares a common wall with the library and the day school wing a new concrete block firewall has been erected (this goes right up into the roof space) as mandated by the fire code. Turning our attention to the Historic Church, in these difficult times Father Bob, the Clergy, singers and musicians ably assisted by an off set team of “production staff” have been producing online content with a very “cobbled together system.” As our time in isolation has rolled on their experiences have highlighted the significant short falls and limitation in that cobbled system and so a revised set of requirements was drawn up and, with Vestry approval, a new and far more capable audio/visual system is being procured for the Historic Church. Installation is ongoing and we are expecting equipment delivery (camera, sound system, channel mixer) and final installation next week. There is something else that's new on the construction site. This week saw the delivery of a "shed load"* of roofing trusses for the back wing and to replace the flat roof that has been the bane of Church maintenance for so long! I feel a roofing activity coming on in the not too distant future! In a break with my “blogging modus operandi” to date by ending with a request for some assistance on the ODEC Campus. Last year the Historic Church’s exterior wood work was cleaned, restored and painted but to keep it in prime condition for years to come the wood work needs an annual gentle power washing to remove organic debris and general grime that if ignored will eventually damage the paintwork. I’m looking for any volunteers with power-washers who would be willing and able to give the Old Church’s exterior woodwork a “mild and sympathetic” washing – no ladder climbing required, water and power provided. If this is something you could help with then please drop me an email to [email protected] or text to 757 339 3679. Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach. Kick off: Get started Voilà: French word meaning “there it is” or “there you are,” used in colloquial English to mean “there it is” or “there you are.” Shed load: English slang for "a great deal" or "a lot"" |
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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