Campus Construction Update February 17, 2022

Associate Vice Chancellor for Finance and Operations Matt Dull chats with University Communications' Dave Blanks about the construction progress for App State's New River Hall.

Transcript

Dave Blanks: Hey, folks. How's it going? This is Dave Blanks from University Communications, back with a Campus Construction Update, of course, because that's what you clicked on. And here we have Matt Dull, who's in the next room. And he's going to talk to us about... What are we going to talk about today, Matt? Campus construction?

Matt Dull: Yeah. Little campus construction.

Dave Blanks: Let's do it.

Matt Dull: A little New River Hall today.

Dave Blanks: Yeah. Little New River Hall. Anywhere else we're going today? Just to give people an idea of where-

Matt Dull: I think that's the main thing today.

Dave Blanks: Okay. We'll stay on the new.

Matt Dull: Stay in the lane. Yeah.

Dave Blanks: All right. Well, what's going on with New River Hall?

Matt Dull: Well, New River's moving along nicely. I think we've kind of talked about a lot of the masonry work going on in the building, putting that prefabricated rock and the actual elk stone rock and the brick. We're about 75, 80% done on that. Pretty much everything's done on the A wing of the building. That's that wing that's closest to River Street. Really focus in on finishing up that B wing now. That's kind of facing where Gardner and Coltrane halls were. So masonry is about 75, 80% done. We've got probably about another month, month and a half of work there to totally complete the masonry work on the downhill slope here. So as they finish up a section of masonry, they're going back, they're finishing up the caulking kind of around the windows and any kind of little trim piece or something that needs the caulking.

Matt Dull: And then also doing the pressure wash cleaning to the brick too. There's a lot of slag and mortar and stuff that kind of drips and falls down. And so pressure washing and kind of cleaning up as they go along, just so it doesn't end up being all that stuff sitting on there for months and months at a time. And then you have a harder time clearing it off later. So that's moving forward really nicely. Also, working on site walls around the building, so all the different little walls that go next to ramps and stairwells and the little bays that trash compactors sit in. All those kind of things are being poured and have that masonry veneer put on them. So trying to do a little bit of this site work, again, as the weather dependent. So, this week's been a little bit better. We've had a few days, tomorrow. Friday, we're recording this, of course, the week before.

Dave Blanks: Right. Revealing, just pulling the curtain out of the way there. They thought it was a live podcast.

Matt Dull: That's right. That's right. So this week we've had good weather. It's been in the forties and fifties a couple of days, so trying to use this good weather while we can.

Dave Blanks: We've had good weather up here, but was it yesterday or the day before when it was like, and this is a total aside and not about construction, but it was like Wilkes County and Caldwell County had some terrible ice and wreck?

Matt Dull: Oh, yes. Ice and freezing fog and all this kind of crazy weather.

Dave Blanks: There was a wreck. I swear, I heard it was 75 cars were involved.

Matt Dull: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Blanks: Did you hear that?

Matt Dull: I heard that as well. And there were a couple on 421, one down in kind of Wilkes and one more up here.

Dave Blanks: That's wild.

Matt Dull: It is wild.

Dave Blanks: It's like a temperature inversion.

Matt Dull: Yeah. Exactly. Someone in our office lives in Wilkes and comes up every day. She had sent me a text that morning and said-

Dave Blanks: It ain't happening.

Matt Dull: ... "Hey, I'm turning around." I'm like, "There's this big car wreck." And I'm like, "What is going on?"

Dave Blanks: And you're looking outside.

Matt Dull: I'm looking outside. It's fine in Boone. I'm looking at our... It's 35, 40 degrees and being like, "What are you talking about?"

Dave Blanks: Right.

Matt Dull: Then I pull up the weather map and I look at Wilkes County. It is that pink, bluish color of wintry mix, freezing rain, all that going on down there.

Dave Blanks: Yeah. But yes, up here it's been fine weather.

Matt Dull: Yes. And the team, they're really moving towards where they're doing seven day weeks where they've got something happening pretty much every day of the week.

Dave Blanks: Right.

Matt Dull: We've had our fair share of snow too in the previous weeks, and so they really got to stay on top of a lot of the exterior work. So we're trying to get in those nice days doing a lot of that exterior work, so that's kind of moving along nicely. And we'll continue through the rest of the next few months as they finish up the project.

Dave Blanks: Since they have access now to that lay down area that's going to end up being the parking lot for that building, and I guess maybe Thunder Hill will also utilize it, I feel like they get in and out of the way.

Matt Dull: Oh, yeah.

Dave Blanks: As a person that drives on Stadium, they get in and out of the way a lot faster.

Matt Dull: Absolutely. Now that you have all this lay down room, it makes it so much easier for offloading materials and queuing up trucks for equipment or materials. You're not having to do that on Stadium Drive or on Jack Branch or whatever. And they can get in, they got a big site to be able to start putting that stuff. So that's been super helpful to have that much lay down space.

Dave Blanks: I have noticed.

Matt Dull: And really, since the very beginning, they really haven't had that kind of... Before we started working on Laurel Creek Hall, they had that kind of area of the old stadium lot as lay down space. But as soon as you start building the foundations for Laurel Creek, there's been literally no lay down space or no space to pull in a truck and let them kind of queue up and wait until they're ready to unload.

Dave Blanks: Right. You're just in the road.

Matt Dull: You're trying to figure out where do these large trucks go while they're waiting or getting unloaded?

Dave Blanks: Now, it is something that we've discussed before is they have storage for materials offsite, somewhere in fairly close proximity.

Matt Dull: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's some storage offsite. That's really getting ready to wind down now too, because-

Dave Blanks: Oh, I was curious.

Matt Dull: ... in the next month to two months, you're really starting to work on those really small, detailed things. Right? So you have all your commodes installed or your faucets and your ceiling tiles and your flooring. And all the stuff that takes up a lot of space, it's all in the building. Right? All your drywall's done. So we're really now getting to where it is the finish work. Someone scuffed up a wall, you got to refinish that wall. It's little detail work that's really left now. So a lot of that material's really getting consolidated to really where, probably in the next month or so, all of that's going to get consolidated onto the site within the lay down space and all of their other spaces are going to close out just because they've got the space now. And everything's really inside the building.

Dave Blanks: And that'll mean fewer trucks having to go up there at all.

Matt Dull: Yeah. Fewer deliveries, fewer trucks going in there. Obviously as we get closer the mid-July timeframe, we are going to have more trucks with furniture. I mean, think about a 750 bed building.

Dave Blanks: That's a lot of beds.

Matt Dull: We'll probably have 20 to 25 truckloads of furniture, mattresses, desks, chairs, refrigerators, all the kind... If you think about all the things that need to be in that building, all that's going to have to be trucked in. So we'll really be moving away from construction materials being there and really more towards all of these furniture and equipment that gets installed in the building kind of as you finish up all the finishes in the building.

Dave Blanks: Gotcha.

Matt Dull: Yeah. This past week, we're doing the punch of all the units and the corridors and the top two floors of the A wing of the building. So really those two floors are practically done. They'll hopefully be a limited amount of little punch list things they have to go back to and things we just kind of notice as you do a walkthrough of the building. That'll kind of continue on a every two week cycle from here on out. They'll kind of do another floor or two every two weeks. We'll get totally finished up, and you'll start doing the punch list. So that A wing of the building, really for punch list, that should really wrap up probably here in the next two months or so. That whole side of that building will be, all intents and purposes, complete, except for a few little touch up things. Then they'll move over to the B wing back towards where Gardner, Coltrane was.

Matt Dull: And that'll be more of that focus in that kind of April, May, early June timeframe of getting that wing of the building kind of wrapped up and ready to punch and finish up. And then they'll move over into furnishing the building, so things are moving nicely. The roof materials all did come in. I can't remember if we talked about that in the last podcast. We were really waiting on that. That's kind of global delays in roof insulation, and roofing materials had been delayed for months. And that finally arrived on site a couple of weeks ago, and they are slowly installing that as you have nice weather days.

Matt Dull: So this would be a great week to do as much to that roof as possible. But those roofing materials, you've got to kind of do whole sections at a time. So you can't just be out there for an hour because it finally hit 40 degrees at three o'clock in the afternoon, but it's going to be 35 at five. You've really got to have pretty good chunks of your day, which is 40 degrees or higher, where they can put that material in. And this is a slightly different material, right, than an asphalt shingle or even a metal roof where it's not as temperature dependent as something like what we call, it's an EPDM roof, which it's built up layers of insulation.

Dave Blanks: What's EPDM stand for, Matt?

Matt Dull: Ethel...

Dave Blanks: Oh, really? No way you know it.

Matt Dull: I can't remember.

Dave Blanks: I was putting you on the spot. I didn't think there was any chance you knew what it was. But Ethel. We'll take that.

Matt Dull: Yeah. Basically it's a type of flexible plastic, and so-

Dave Blanks: Polymer? E-P.

Matt Dull: I don't remember.

Dave Blanks: Come on.

Matt Dull: Polyethylene whatever.

Dave Blanks: We'll take it. All right. We'll take it.

Matt Dull: So EPDM is a roof membrane material. It goes on top of all this insulation and it provides that real water protection and environmental, that UV protection that you... It really just preserves all that roof material and then keeps water from penetrating down into the building.

Dave Blanks: Oh, wait. Are you talking about ethyl propylene diene monomer rubber?

Matt Dull: Yeah. That's exactly what I was talking about.

Dave Blanks: Yeah. It just came to me. Somehow I figured that out.

Matt Dull: But yes, EPDM is one of a couple of different types of membrane material you can use. And that's what we use.

Dave Blanks: Now, see here, I thought it was that kind of music that people listen to. Into the real... The EPDM.

Matt Dull: What is that?

Dave Blanks: That's EDM.

Matt Dull: EDM, right? EDM.

Dave Blanks: Very different. It won't keep your building dry.

Matt Dull: Very different. Very different.

Dave Blanks: I've derailed us completely. Is there anything else of note that we would like to mention before I let you leave here?

Matt Dull: Yeah. I think that hits the highlights. Really thinking about the A wing is really in that finishing stage, the B wing is really finishing with drywall at the bottom of the building and then starting the finishing phase here in the next couple of weeks as you get to the top of the building.

Dave Blanks: All right.

Matt Dull: But things are moving along nicely and we'll...

Dave Blanks: I'll derail you more next week. Don't worry.

Matt Dull: I keep thinking about the electronic dance music. The EPDM roof is going on as the weather allows as well.

Dave Blanks: Matt, thank you for your time, sir.

Matt Dull: Absolutely. Thanks, Dave.

Dave Blanks: All right. We'll do it again.

Matt Dull: Sounds good.