Building the Community Building

The greatest news! The third party review has finally finished! So now it's back in the Town of Blacksburg's hands to finish up the permitting process. So possibly by next week the crew will be back at work, laying down the under-slab plumbing.

On the plus side, we did not have to worry about construction noises getting in the way of the middle school outdoor Shakespeare plays, the arts show and graduation, or worry about losing power to the kiln room for the last few weeks of art. And of course, that is because we are facing significant delays on the project. The main hold-up, it seems, is getting the third-party reviewer to approve the plan for the canopies that run between the main building and the new community building. Things are still going back-and-forth between them, the architect, and what the town will approve. Hopefully we will get good news soon, and start pouring concrete!

While waiting on the final approval from our 3rd party review, the crew came today to do a final inspection of the site to make sure the ground was ready for cement. This involved bringing in a fully-loaded dump truck to run back-and-forth across the site and inspect the ground conditions during/after. The good news is that we passed!

Sadly the most exciting thing that happened this week was the workers' porta-potty being emptied. Hopefully next week brings more action! :)

While we had a day off from school on Friday (teachers were working on report cards), the construction crew were working hard on the water line. They finished digging the ditch and placing in the new line, and the town came out to inspect the work. It looks like everything went well, and the ditch has been fully filled in. This means we're back to our normal (well, "new-normal") arrival and departure path for students and parents.

Always keeping us on our toes, today the construction workers started digging a long trench from the main water line, across the front of the school, to where the new Community Building will be. While the trench isn't that deeep, nor that wide, it did require yet another re-routing of our entrance (especially for lunch duties, and at pick-up time). Every day seems to be different! And luckily it looks like they were able to route it under the bike path and our sidewalks, so nothing needed to be cut or destroyed. In conjunction with this, we were told that the water would be shut off to the school for at least an hour. So we requested that this occurr at 4pm, and encouraged everyone in ASP to use the bathrooms prior to this!

Having finished off most of the work on the field area, today's attention was spent on starting the water line. This will be connected to the main line by the street, and then routed across the bike path, behind the orange plastic netting in front of the school, and then over to the new Community Building. We'll keep an eye on the progress to make sure there's still a safe way to enter and exit the school for pickup/drop-off. In other news, we had our first monthly meeting with representatives from all elements of this project. We looked at what the subcontractor had been up to, discussed some details about the scope of the project, and all parties came away satisfied. It was also nice being able to walk inside the job site and better visualize the dimensions of the new building. And then came the fun part. Tile samples! We have been given a stack of tile samples, and have been tasked with finding what tile best matches the old tile (specicially for tying into the bumpo...