In Operation

As I said a few posts ago, it was a busy year.  You may have noticed I have no pics or posts of the sheet-rock, electrical and such, mainly because we were not in the country during that part of the process.

When we were on vacation, Dave Tulp and his son Kyle did an amazing job getting the building wired and ready to get the sheet-rock and finishing touches completed.  

Dave and Kyle worked with us to save money and get the industrial look we wanted for the building.  We have all exposed metallic conduit and flexible armored cabling in the bullpen and standard wiring in the areas that got covered in sheet-rock.  I wish I had pics of the superb job they did.  Too bad it is all hidden the walls!

All of the lighting in the facility is either LED or high efficiency florescent.  The entire lighting load for 5000 square feet is less than the load of 5 old style 100w incandescent bulbs.  It cost us a few bucks up front, but it will be well worth it as we start getting electrical bills.

Even the exterior lights are all LED.  Luckily we found matching barn lights for the front of the facility to the original.


Since I have little more to say about the process, I will post a few pics of where we are today. 

Cherub has been in the new building for about a year.  Most of the interior work is complete, although there is still a ton of trim and finish work to do.  My time at present is getting the roof dealt with and a few small leaks taken care of.

So, here we are in the bullpen.  Colours and painting was done by our neighbor and good friend Carla Craven.  The feeling she went for is blocks of colours like small building inside the larger space.  Personally I think it feels like children's play blocks, wish I kinda like for our business.

The bullpen.

Nita's office on left, bathrooms and server room on right.

View into Kitchen, AJ's office and patient training room.  Still a lot of trim work to do!

East bullpen.  Screens are for when staff wants a bit of privacy.

We went a little crazy on the kitchen.  As we have told everyone we know, the kitchen at Cherub is only a few square feet short of being the size of our entire house's first floor.  We wanted a space that the staff could go crazy cooking in and double as a meeting area.  I think we did well.

Our HUGE kitchen.  25x25 foot of cooking wonderland.

Wet station and storage.

Executive bath. 

 In the bathrooms we have 3 very different feels.  The bath off the bullpen has a quite luxurious feel with Venetian plaster walls, a custom painted floor and silver leafed antique furniture and trim.

The warehouse bath is plain black tile and small IKEA sink.  Nothing fancy.

The third bathroom off the patient area is a throwback to the origins of the building.  We went with a 1920 style white and black scheme that took me weeks to perfect.  Not that it is perfected, but it at least looks good.

I wish my camera could take in all of the bathrooms, they came out quite nicely.

We also have huge agricultural evacuation fans for each bathroom instead of standard bathroom fans.  What a pleasant difference!!!

 Over in the patient education room we have comfy furniture and lots to play with.  One of our staff, Kat, is working on a mural in the kiddo's area.  This is going to be the highlight of our building!

Mural underway.  Critter teaparty!  The animals represent different employees.

Little beaver needs more coffee darnit!

It is a relief to be up and running in the new facility.  We can't thank everyone enough for all of the hard work and splendid work that had gone into the project.  It has been a joy and a real pain in the butt at times, but well worth it.

We have a lot more to do.  I will try to post as we get more completed.



 Thanks to everyone for all the love and support.  Our friends, family and employees are the best!

The Doors

When we bought the property we knew we had some exterior esthetic issues to deal with.  Part of that was the doors in the rear of the facility and the pull down garage door on the front.

The rear doors required heavy steel security doors so we had Overhead Door KC come in to the the replacements.  I did a lot of work with them in the past and trust their products and install methods.  From experience at Sprint, I know it is almost impossible to break through their steel security products with anything short of a large truck.

That's a big hole in my building.

Takes a team to carry the steel security frame.

Side door to parking.  I had real worries about this door till we got this in.

The gent who gave us the bid recommended a large transom window over the door in the warehouse.  We loved that idea.  More light equaled less electricity used to illuminate warehouse and winter solar gain would make it a tad cheaper to heat.  A win both ways.





As for the garage door in the front of the facility, my good friend John and I removed the old pull down door and framed the opening in for a faux carriage door.

Framing waiting to go.

Framing installed, waiting to get finishing touches.

To be honest, the rough in of the front door sat that way for quite a while as we worked on other projects.  Finally we made a run to Bloomer Hardwoods to pick up the giant order of pin oak we ordered to complete the faux carriage door and some other trim projects.

It took John and I a few days to get the materials milled to our needs and installed.  We opted for less than energy efficient windows, as our window guys wanted around $1000 to make inserts for us.  Given that the rest of the bullpen windows are not insulated, $34 of lexan struck as as reasonable.

After getting the exterior complete, we gave it a coat of Cabot oil stain.

All finished, apart from iron work.

I'm biased, but looks great!

There are a set of hand forged iron handles and strap hinges on the way.  Cannot wait to see it finished.

Getting the Heat On.

Yes, Im going a little out of order here.  Sharp eyed readers will notice the sand blasting was done after the HVAC was installed.  I forgot.  Sue me.

Local Shawnee Kansas HVAC company KB Complete gave us a great bid on the 3 different HVAC systems.  We have a small 4 ton system for the warehouse, an 8 ton package rooftop unit for the bullpen area and a Mitsubishi mini split system with 3 heads to take care of the kitchen, patient training area and AJ's office.  The best of all worlds I suppose.

Warehouse unit.

Hanging the spiral duct.

 

 

 Harold, Kenny, and the guys came in and got started hanging the systems well out of the way of daily operations.  They were amazingly understanding with our long schedule and came in over the course of 6 months to get things installed as we got different phases completed.

Package unit hoisted to the roof.

Suitcase unit for the mini splits.

Lead

Yep, we found lead in the paint what was on the walls in the front of the office area.  At first our plan was to leave the brick painted, but clean it well and live with it.

Nope!

After I found some suspicious looking paint I bought some test kits and did a bunch of random swab tests.  Lead, and lots of it.

Luckily the folks at Blast it Clean had been in to give us an early bid on taking the paint off so they were familiar with the property.  When it was cosmetic the cost seemed prohibitive.  Now that it was a lead removal operation, it was a bargain!

They came in and sealed the building areas that were not to be blasted and got to work.

Sealed for your protection.  Mostly...

Front area before.

After

Bullpen before.

Bullpen after

Blast it Clean used an amazing product that encapsulated the lead paint as they shot the walls.  Cleanup was a breeze, allowing the debris to go right into a standard landfill.  Super job all around!

Just a little mess...

Wow, what a year!

Well is had been quite some time since I updated the blog.  We had an incredibly busy year and things got completely away from me.

I will try to get the process updated as best I can over the next few days.  I have taken a few new pics and found some old ones, so the process should go a little smoother.

So where did we leave off?  Seems like it was with the concrete.

Once the floors were poured, we were able to start the framing, electrical, plumbing, insulation and such.

I have a few pics of each stage, but I wont bore you all with detail pics of the electrical, plumbing and such, just the high points.


Framing was first.  We had to divide the real warehouse from the front office bullpen area.  The big diving wall was first.

Main curtain wall between warehouse and the bullpen, viewed from the rear of warehouse.  Floors are shiny!!

From there we roughed in Nita's office, and on the other side of the room the warehouse bathroom, executive bathroom and server room.

Server room and bathrooms being framed.

Over in the old printshop we built AJ's office, the kitchen and the 3rd bathroom in the patient area.  We found some additional surprises there, making replacing the entire front window a necessity.  On the up side, replacing 16 feet of single pane glass with a high quality double pane thermal window is a really good idea.

AJ's office

Kitchen framing.

 

After we got things framed, we fired up the spray foam kits and got the whole of the print shop sealed with 2" of high density foam.  With the foam deck on the new roof, we now have R90 in the ceilings.  Not bad at all.

 

Main building framing completed.  Both areas have been updated with heavy ceiling joists for storage areas.

Next: Lead, HVAC, and such.

Putting a Lid on Things

In mid January, the weather finally warmed up enough to get the new roof put on the smaller section of the building.  We had been waiting for months, as the roofing crews could not install the nifty new membrane roofing system.

Unlike traditional hot tar roofing of days gone by, the newer technology is a heat fused synthetic envelope that once installed, forms a completely sealed, one piece membrane with no seams, no chances for water to penetrate as the roof ages.

The company installing ours, Buck Roofing from Merriam Kansas is yet another company I have worked with in the past and had nothing but good experiences.

First task was to tear off the years of old hot tar roofing so we could take a look at the wooden decking underneath.  Some damage we knew about, the termite damage was a bit of a nasty surprise.  No worries tho, we replaced the bad decking and treated the termite damage just in case they ever decided to come back.  While we did have the entire building treated prior to the concrete pour, it never hurts to make sure...

 After the tear off, the insulation layers went down.  Just 3 inches of foam decking gives us not only an R-30 insulation layer, it provides a cushion under the membrane roofing in case of impact from hail, ice, Santa's Reindeer, etc.  Once complete the roof will be rated for full pedestrian traffic, much as a restaurant rooftop rooftop deck may have.

Foam down, the guys started laying the membrane.  Blinding white, it will provide us a reflective barrier against the summer sun, hopefully cutting our cooling bills even further.

Completed, the roof is amazing looking.  Can't wait for a good hard rain to test it out!

Thanks to the guys at Buck Roofing, they did a fantastic job.