Remodel and Construction News

June 27^th Update

Hall and Kitchen - We completed the inground and major plumbing, plus any of the in ground electrical lines we needed, so we will begin to work on actual structure this coming week.  That means the framers will be coming in to start on the walls, and we will be looking to schedule concrete for patching up the floors as soon as all the other concrete work is ready (just outside the main hall on both the north and south).

Plumbing - In completing the new plumbing through the hall, we are connecting to our existing sewer line outside the hall to the south side.  There it joins with the lines from the bathrooms.  While we had lines open, our plumber scoped out the sewer line most of the way to the street.   The news wasn't great, as some of you know these lines are often slow and have issues.  We will at least flush and ream the line out, which will remove some of the encrustration.  We are are also looking at the option of re-lining them, depending on how the other work comes out.

Electrical - As we mentioned, with our site electrical upgrade, we will need to update the lines from the city service to our new main Switchgear.  This will involve putting in two new high voltage lines underground, and cutting across our driveway.  The requirements for the lines is such that we have to physically dig a trench to lay the cable and encase them properly, it can not be done by boring under the drive way.  We did not plan on this work and so it is one of those "discoveries" that we have contingency funds for.  However, this does mean for about a week we will be dealing with a constrained entry.  We are working with a couple bidders on this effort, and so we do not have the final details, including schedule, yet.  We hope to know more in about a week.

Other news:

Sanctuary addition and children's wing – This remodel are maddeningly taking longer than anticipated to get the city approval.   Just so you know, there are 5 items with the city in play to get this done.

- Demolition Plan:  Yes, we need to submit a separate plan of what we will take down - the demo plan - to the city Building Department.   The lastest version was submitted on 6/22

- Grading Permit: We also need a separate permit from the Public Works department for grading the flat portion that we will build on.  The permit not only needs to be in place, but the grading done and inspected prior to issuance of the building permit.   The latest version was submitted on 6/15 (this is where we had the issue with the old Agricultural Easement that the city worked with us on cleaning up).

- Administrative Amendment:  We are also submitting a seperate Amendment to our use permit to the city Planning Department.  This Amendment discusses in general what we are doing, and any changes to our use or impacts to city services or neighborhood traffic.  We really don't impact anything, since the new addition does not include any new meeting space, per se (Bathrooms, Workroom, etc - don't count against our capacity), however, we still need to submit this as part of the process.

These three need to be approved before we actually get the Building Permit to actually BUILD the addition.  So the actual building plans are done and have been reviewed several times already, but we are waiting to resubmit the final plans until we get at least basic comments back from all of the above.

But wait, there is more - There is a Certificate of Compliance for our lot.  This is a hard to explain, but it involves a Surveyor, Title Reports, and City Paperwork - and that is not the beginning of a joke.   In any case, we have submitted our first draft and revieved comments back and our surveryor is working through them - hopefully to resubmit this coming week.  This does not hold up build, but needs to be done before occupancy - so we have a few months to work through this.

Fischer Bathrooms - We finished the four sets of bathrooms (two sets on each floor).  There are one more set that we would like to do (the first floor western most bathrooms), however, since this area is covered by the new ADA bathrooms, we have held off doing this last set until the end of our projects to see how much reserve money we have.

Although this is taking much longer than anyone anticipated, it's encouraging to see progress moving forward, even if it is a slow pace. 

More to come soon!

Continue to pray for:

- Finding cost effective solutions to the work, while building in a way that shows good use of God’s resources,

- Safety for those working on our facility, we have had one significant accident/injury on the job already, pray for his healing and for the safety of others at our site,

- Quick and favorable review and approval of the remaining plans that are in with the city review.