Today I can report a significant change in the economics of the emergency roof repair business in Virginia Beach. The cash-cow that was the ODEC flat-roof is no more and we now have a fine, pitched roof covering the rest of the day school, library, corridor, and the front façade of the building. True, the roof is, as yet, without shingles, but it is, as they say in the construction business, “now dry” because the water barrier and felt layers have been installed. I very much hope the message of a “dry future” will soon gain the trust of the day school’s directors and teachers and they no longer feel the need to leave their classrooms and offices festooned with buckets and bins to catch those inevitable leaks that have blighted their lives for so many years. I was lucky enough to get a tour of the new roof. From ground level you just can’t appreciate how complicated and vast it really is or the way it spans the old flat roof and integrates a veritable smorgasbord of existing pitched roofing into a seamless entity. Underneath the plywood covering there is a myriad of frames and beams that very much reminded me of the J2A’s pilgrimage visit to Salisbury Cathedral. We were taken on a Cathedral tour up into the roof and then up the tower to the very base of the Cathedral’s famous spire, led by a guide who must have been in his late seventies but as spritely as a mountain goat. I recall the roof space and it looked very similar to our construction with spars, beams, and frames in every direction albeit on a slightly grander scale! Whilst I well recall the Cathedral’s roof space my powers of recollection and description of the inside of the spire or of the, no doubt, phenomenal view from the aspect of a small exterior walkway at the spire’s base, are somewhat muted. This is as you should expect from an acrophobic standing 230 feet above the ground on a small ledge built in the thirteen century and without the benefit of any City inspectors!! Well enough of the roof, let me shine the blog’s spotlight on “firewalls.” If you’ve visited the ODEC campus, or perused through the online new building photo album, you may have seen or noticed some pretty impressive, concrete block walls being erected in what seems to be the middle of the building. These are the firewalls and are a building code requirement designed to ensure that a fire in one area of the building is contained in that area for two to three hours. We have firewalls between the rear wing and the existing library, between Tucker Hall and the narthex and between the narthex and the office wing. All these firewalls will, in the final build, be concealed as internal walls but in the meantime an interesting side effect is the apparent “bricking” up of existing windows. Father Bob’s office is now a dark, windowless cave as is the old library whilst part of the kindergarten classroom is now windowless. This is also happening across the palladium window in Tucker Hall and as the bricklayers ply their trade the light behind our stained glass panel is gradually fading but take heart, there is no doubt a bright future for the stained glass panel when it’s relocated to grace one of the palladium windows in the new Great Hall! Now I confess I am a big machine “groupie,” I don’t actually hang around outside garages or construction yards you understand but I am keen on the big machines and this week was an absolute treat. We were visited by a “slipform concrete curb machine” that very much resembled an early twentieth century tracked tractor with one steering track at the front and two drive tracks on either side. The machine’s purpose is to extrude concrete curbing and to do that this lumbering contraption lays a continuous line of concrete curb whilst being guided by a small metal filament resting on a string marking the line of the new curb. I was struck how it brought to mind a blind person reaching out to a handrail for guidance and support. This wondrous machine is no “one trick pony,” far from it. I have learnt there are different types of curb stone. There’s the rather common “parks” curbing for edging sidewalks and grassy areas and then there’s the curbing that includes the flat gutter that we frequently see at the side of roads. With a quick change in the “form” the clever machine can extrude a wide variety of curb types, we have both the parks and the gutter type on our campus which gives me a nice segue into my next piece of news. All of this curb laying is just a small part of the bigger picture of constructing vehicle entrances and pathways around the new campus. Within the next week the new entrance/exit, the one where the herb garden used to be, will be given a temporary surface and made operational for one-way traffic. This will be used as an exit from the campus, so vehicles will enter via the Cathedral Drive entrance and leave via this temporary exit thus avoiding the need to make a U-turn by the bell tower. And there’s more, next week will also see the opening of the new, concrete path that connects the N. Witchduck Rd crossing to hard standing by the Bell Tower. This will allow folks to use the Sentara car park and walk to the Church doors without the need to navigate around flower beds and over wet grass. It has been a very full and busy week on the construction site and I’ve not even touched on the windows and electrical systems being installed in the rear wing or Troy who has been digging the new conduit that will provide high speed internet connectivity to the Historic Church. Enough if my ramblings, stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach Troy Digging the Conduit
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IIt was late July, Scott Crumley and I had just emerged from a meeting with Father Bob and Gretchen Hood where the prospects of opening the Day School in September was discussed and as re-opening seemed unlikely the decision to accelerate the construction was taken.
Right from the get-go the construction plan had been designed to minimize, to the greatest extent possible, impacts on the day-to-day business of ODEC and the day school whilst maintaining compliance with fire code for an occupied building, which mainly entailed making sure there were sufficient exit doors to be code compliant. It was, of course, always recognized that some impacts were going to be inevitable but with a careful, stepwise approach over a 18 to 22 month schedule it was hoped these could be minimized. With the meeting’s decision to leverage the opportunity offered by a near empty campus by accelerating construction the step wise approach went out of the window. Translated into words a layman could understand (that would be me) the new approach set aside the paced, sequential approach we’d followed to date and now had carte blanche to “go at it” from all angles at once and no finer way to start down this path than a spot of demolition. Instant action, within days the front of the building was ripped off, the car park was ripped up and the ceiling in the kindergarten was ripped out – it really was a ripping time! And there was more, to replace the flat roof over the library, corridor and day school wing nearly a ton of masonry had to be removed to establish a level and secure base for the new pitched roof. Progress in every direction, what could possibly go wrong with the plan? Well, sometime after adopting the “go at it from all angles” building approach, and after a great deal of careful planning and hard work by the day school directors and staff, reopening the day school became a feasible option and the school was at last able to open it's doors to its pupils on 8 Sep. Bit of a “curve-ball” for the construction plan! With great alacrity ceilings were replaced, lighting was installed, holes where windows should be were concealed, new power cables were installed, air conditioning units were re-commissioned, sewer lines were repaired, parking was organized and safe access was set in place. I feel I’ve missed something ……… of course the roof! How could I have forgotten the roof? If a ton of masonry is removed from an, albeit slightly leaky, flat roof and it rains, even with a partial pitched roof frame and plywood in place over the top, there are bound to be some leaks! If it rains really, really hard and the scuppers aren’t exactly what the used to be, which at their best wasn’t much, then not only does water get into the rooms below but the far greater risk from rainwater pooling on the flat roof and then causing a “breach” that would do significant damage to a classroom's ceiling. Remember Thursday 17 September? It absolutely “hammered down*” from early afternoon into Friday daybreak, the weather radar for Witchduck Rd was red, red and more red! The worst possible conditions for our half-finished roof and a disaster seemed imminent – or would have been had it not been for Scott Crumley mounting an individual watch through that stormy night. Placing buckets and bins under ceiling leaks, mopping wet floors and carpet tiles, and most importantly keeping the scuppers flowing by strategically “twitching” (my words not his) the flat roof’s rubber membrane to prevent water pooling. At a conservative estimate during that wet and windy night the storm deposited over 20,000 gallons of rainwater on the flat roof and of that less than 20 gallons penetrated into the building below and much of that was caught in buckets thanks to Scott’s diligence and dedication. Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach. “Hammered down”: In the Brits escalating scale of rain fall descriptions “hammered down” is one up from “raining cats and dogs”! Visitors Head Home After Inspecting The Site As I have just discovered the construction at ODEC is cracking on at such a pace you really can’t afford to turn your back for even a few days without missing something important. When my wife and I left for a short vacation the framers (that’s the folks responsible for building the roof) had just arrived on site whilst at the front the footings (trenches) were just being completed in the Great Hall/Narthex sand pad. Get back a few days later to a veritable cacophony of activities with framers, electricians, brick layers and Higgerson (yes they are back) all hard at it and creating quite a vibe in the neighborhood! In the case of the concrete contractor it might have been a “vibe too far” with their 0515 a.m. start on laying the concrete footings for the Great Hall and Narthex, it seems time, tide and concrete contractors wait for no man! The stack of roofing trusses is rapidly diminishing, and I think we are past the tipping point with more trusses on the building than on the ground. This area of roofing will not only cover the new rear wing but will also provide a pitched roof to replace the leaking apology for a flat roof that has blighted the day school, library and other sundry areas with water leaks for many years. This is proving to be a complicated piece of engineering because the existing buildings’ roof lines change like the Manhattan skyline and stand testament to the building projects that created our existing infrastructure over the course of many years. However, everything is starting to look “on the level” and so quite soon the new roof will be rolled out over the day school, library, corridor and other areas! I’ve already mentioned the concrete poured for the foundation, the great concrete pump was on site and I missed it, so now the concrete blocks for the footings are being laid soon to be followed with the installation of the under floor utilities, such as plumbing, before laying the concrete floor. A blog or so back I reported on Higgerson’s departure from the site but now Ryan and his team are back and busy “cutting in” the new vehicle entrances for the campus. One entrance, in the area where the old herb garden used to be, is for the new car park that will be located at the end of the Great Hall and the second will be a drive-in/drive-out drop off loop located beside Tucker Hall, which will service the Witchduck Rd door to the Narthex. It seems every small piece of site construction has to be inspected before moving forward and so it was with the “cut” for the new car park entrance as I watched a City inspector giving it the once over. I am delighted to report he seemed to be content with what he saw. One other noteworthy event to report. Some might regard sewers as part of the less seemly side of construction, a necessary service that is best left in the dark recesses of the construction craft and not openly discussed. Well that’s all well and good until a sewer doesn’t work then they really grab the headlines! You may recall way back in the mists of time, towards the start of our construction adventure, the sewer architecture serving AFH, Tucker Hall and the day school wing came under scrutiny because the subterranean system ran where the new rear wing needed to be. In the absence of any records or plans the sewer lines serving AFH and the day school were located and re-routed, “job’s a good’un*” or so everyone thought. For some reason, better known to those who went before us, the sewer system had a concealed “strategic reserve” sewer line that became very evident in the most dramatic fashion when the day school returned. We are fortunate to have the multi-talented Mr Crumley on the team because before the day school toilets flooded thrice he had identified the problem and initiated emergency remedial action so once again sewers on the campus can return to their anonymity! Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach “job’s a good’un”: South West of England (Counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall) colloquial phrase for doing a good job. The City Inspector Visits The Site
This past week construction has been moving forward on all fronts at a mesmerizing pace, Great Hall/Narthex, rear wing and Day School have all felt the attention of Scott Crumley’s construction plans! At the front the sand pad, recently recovered from Amazon using it to test the multi-terrain capabilities of a white panel van (not good), has been surveyed, the location of the walls marked, trenches for the footings dug and the steel rebars set in place so everything is prepared for the concrete footings pour next week. Readers may recall from the rear wing how a layer of concrete is poured into the trenches to form the “footings” that provide the foundation on which the concrete blocks that hold up the walls are placed. That's enough of “Construction 101,” as one with an eye for the heavy machinery like myself, the grand thing about laying footings is it marks the return of one of my favorite pieces of machinery to date, the mighty concrete pump. Not to be out done the long awaited “roofing” has started on the new rear wing that will also replace the remaining flat roof over the Day School, library, and corridor. So hopefully the days of having the emergency roof repair man on speed dial will be over and water damaged ceiling tiles will be a not so fond, distant memory. This week it’s been the framers turn to start “doing their thing” on the rear wing roof. If you have ever visited the rood space in your house you will have seen the roof trusses and the complex web of wood braces and beams that keeps this skeleton in place. If you are anything like me you’ve probably felt the pain those trusses can inflict on an unsuspecting head as you rummage around looking for an elusive suitcase that you’re positive was thrown out 5 years but “another” in the house has a different idea but then I digress. The framer’s processes are fascinating, after erecting a temporary wooded frame each truss from that huge stockpile of trusses deposited behind Tucker Hall is identified, lifted up by a truly entrancing green, extending arm fork lift truck, and carefully laid in its correct order on the temporary frame. Last but not least the Day School! The kindergarten classroom was finished off with a stiff cleaning from our Sexton then handed back for occupation and I have to say the teachers have done a wonderful job in transforming the space in readiness for the start of term. Then there was the air conditioning, or lack thereof in the music room and nursery classrooms. It would be exaggerating to say it was a “Houston we have a problem," but getting power back to those air conditioning units was not just a matter of changing a fuse! It transpired that way back in time, around April this year, whilst excavating the rear wing a mystery cable had to be removed that seemed to have no purpose in life. We now know that cable had a purpose and to fulfill that purpose it ran under the courtyard to power those air conditioning units. So new cable and conduit, taking an above ground route, have been laid and cool air is now pulsing through those rooms, "lovely chubbly"*!! I couldn’t end without drawing your attention to the New Building Photograph Album on Flickr, Gretchen Hood includes the link in the Daily Prayers email. The album gives a pictorial record of the build from day one including photographs of the individuals working on site and, of course the machinery, including the big, green forklift. And there is more, thanks to Chris Higgerson, the owner of Higgerson Inc the site contractor, I have been able to post some aerial photographs of the construction which I think are well worth a look! I will be out of town so next week will be “blog free” unless the blog spirit moves me to write about staying in a cabin high in the Blue Ridge…….on second thoughts probably not. Stay safe and stay healthy, David Beach "Lovely chubbly": Cockney phrase meaning something is good or enjoyable (Cockney is someone who was born within the sound of the Church of St Mary-le-Bow in East London) |
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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