At work we’re building an 18 million dollar addition on our school building. The addition includes a new kitchen, new cafeteria, new front entrance, new 900 seat theater, new scenery shop, new makeup rooms, and a bunch of other stuff. It is actually really exciting for me because I was on the team that helped design this new addition.

Today I had the pleasure of walking through the construction project to see the progress. Steve, the site manager for the project walked me through to show me how things are going. First of all, let me say that Steve is a really cool guy and has done an amazing job of keeping things rolling. Up until I’ve been involved in this project, I had absolutely no idea just how complicated a project of this magnitude would be. Steve has done a great job of coordinating all of the various contractors to keep things moving.

The new addition is scheduled to be open next fall, and they have come a long way, but have a long way to go yet. All of the exterior walls are up and they are currently heating the new addition. What I thought was interesting, and particularly clever, is the way they decided to heat the new structure during construction. Rather than do the simple thing which was to rent big natural gas heaters, Steve realized that if he moved up the plumbing schedule, he could get all of the steam pipes in place before it got very cold. The steam pipes are hooked to the existing boiler system in the building and the boilers are running anyway. So, instead of renting natural gas heaters and paying a huge gas bill, he rented steam coil heaters and used the steam that our boilers were producing anyway. Good plan, huh?

Anyway, the project is progressing nicely and it is fun to see it take shape. There is enough done now that it is easy to visualize how it is all going to look when it is done. When it is done, it will be really nice.

–Pete