Now that we have reached the end of winter, spring is upon us, which means summer is coming, and fall not far behind. This seems like I am getting ahead of things a bit, but there is so much to do at the school yet that fall will be here before we know it.
I know I had already written about our cleaning up process, but I recently obtained a lot of new photos of the early cleaning days, so I thought you might enjoy seeing a few more photos from that. Over the last few years, so many different people with different needs have used the building, and each one added or changed things to suit their purposes. Add to that the fact that when most of them left, they just packed and went, and left all their changes for someone else to deal with. About the only “repair” that was made was to remove the swimming pool and install the basketball floor, which we are really thankful for.
The landscaping outside needed some taming, of course. There were a few volunteer trees right next to the building, and lots of mowing and trimming of weeds to do. We discovered one interesting thing while we were looking back at old aerial photos. At least until 2008, there was a row of larger trees along the west side of the north wing, pretty close to the building. Not sure we would have left these, but they would have given a bit of shade in the afternoon. Does anyone remember these trees being there?
Having all the large classrooms available made the building attractive to small businesses who wanted to rent one room and subdivide it. One room was split into 4 or 5 smaller rooms. All of these had to be removed completely. There was also a lot of office furniture and home furnishings that had to be removed. Anyone who needs exercise equipment should have been there, although I’m not sure how good it was at this point. Carpets had to be removed as well, as they were very worn and not the quality we will need to stand up to school traffic.
Although the basement isn’t very big, it took it’s fair share of effort. The guys hauled a lot of big, unwieldy and heavy pieces of equipment out and scrapped them. There was a lot of water down there as well, and that had to be addressed by some outside landscaping and repairs. The water also played a big part in having to remove most of the ceilings in the building. The tiles were glued to the underside of the original cement slab roof, and even some of the tiles that hadn’t gotten wet were loose. We want to lower the ceilings a bit, and we don’t want tiles falling on top of that, so they had to come out.
The dampness also messed up the large built-in cabinets that were in several rooms. It seemed a shame, but they had to come out because they were delaminating and didn’t work well. Once particle board gets wet, it’s done.
Although we still have a lot of work ahead of us, looking back at these pictures, you see just how much we have already done. Seems like the cleanup was as much work as the fix-up!
It’s easy to think of cleanup as pretty much labor, but there are a lot of costs that go with it. As always, if you would like to donate to our project, you can go on our website, www.uccs.school, there is a Donate button there, or you can contact us for more information.
Not sure what we’ll cover next time, but I’m sure something will be going on!
