Campus Construction Update, June 7, 2021

Associate Vice Chancellor for Finance and Operations Matt Dull and University Communications' Dave Blanks are back with the latest details on App State campus construction in this brand-new Campus Construction Update. In this week's episode, the two discuss the construction progress for Laurel Creek Residence Hall, as well as the progress of New River Hall, located on the site of the former Justice Hall, and the upcoming demolition of Coltrane and Gardner halls.

Transcript

Dave Blanks: Hey, folks. I'm Dave Blanks from University Communications. We are back with a Campus Construction Update after some much-needed vacay for Matt and for myself. Hello, Matt Dull. That's the Matt I'm talking about. How are you?

Matt Dull: Hey, Dave. How are you doing?

Dave Blanks: I'm good. I'm all rested. I'm relaxed. I'm ready to be back into the update game. I hope you are, too.

Matt Dull: I am. It felt really nice to be able to just get away and check out for a little bit and do a little vacation after a long school year.

Dave Blanks: Absolutely. So did you go to the beach? I went to the beach.

Matt Dull: Yep. Also went to the beach. It was nice just to get unplugged for a little bit.

Dave Blanks: Very cool. It was much needed. But now we're back, and construction has continued, even while we were away.

Matt Dull: It definitely continued, even while we were away, and ...

Dave Blanks: Somehow without us they continued to build.

Matt Dull: Somehow, they still knew what to do. So yeah, lots of changes going on on the site. We've got Building 300, or Laurel Creek Hall, our third building. If y'all will remember that we are playing to open that up this fall. We've got students assigned to the buildings, students ready to kind of move in here and August, which feels like a long time away, but really just about two months away, we'll have our hall staff moving in kind of early August. We're about two months away from finishing up that building. Brickwork is now substantially complete. They're now going through and kind of cleaning the brick and getting any kind of the leftover dirt, debris, dust, that coming off the face of the brick to really give us a nice final, kind of clean-looking building. So that's happening over the past few weeks. Inside of the building, we're really focused on doing punch list items and those kind of really final little touch-ups to all the student bedrooms and hallways throughout the building. For the most part, those student bedrooms and bathrooms that are in those units, they are substantially complete. We have been literally just kind of walking through and looking for, you know, little nicks in the paint and doors that don't close quite right, or, you know, the little stuff. You call it, the punch list items. So, little things the contractors need to go back in and kind of get cleaned up or finished up. But the team's done a really great job making this easy, where the punch list is pretty short and the rooms are looking great and they're looking pretty darn close to having students move in. So, that is exciting. From a construction perspective, interior of the building, a lot of that focus is really shifting toward the finishes and the central core of the building at the first floor. That's kind of the last part of the real significant construction left is that kind of lobby, laundry room, office area that's in that central, bottom part of the building, on the bottom floor. The main entrance to the building. So that's the last piece. We've got kind of everything kind of closing in on that last little section of the first floor. So drywall will be going in next week to that area and we are putting in the ceiling grid and ceiling tile — that'll start going in here in the next week or so. That'll start to substantially make that area look finished. It's still kind of in a rough form. You know, in a couple of weeks, we'll actually be pouring a terrazzo floor in there. That'll take a week or so to do the terrazzo floor. Then we'll also be putting in storefront window systems and doors and everything to kind of finish off the little central, kind of, main entrance to the building. That'll be kind of the last interior part of the building, where all the energy is going to be focused right there in that central part of the building as we wrap up the inside. So, that's going to be really, probably the big focus and more of that June time frame of really finishing that central core.

Dave Blanks: Fantastic. You know, you can get terrazzo on bedsheets. You can get terrazzo ...

Matt Dull: Really? Like the pattern of it?

Dave Blanks: Yes, you can get the pattern of terrazzo. Yes. You can get a chair with like a speckled terrazzo vibe. I was like, wow! Is terrazzo like a section of Italy or something like that? I mean, it sounds like it might be Italian. I don't know. I have no idea. More on terrazzo later, or we can do it now, if you know what ... what is it?

Matt Dull: Well, so terrazzo is a type of finish. It's a really durable ... I'm going to get the exact, like, material mixed up. If you think about it, it's like little, I think it's little pieces of quartz that usually give the flakes. You know, I think about back to my elementary school or a really institutional setting. A lot of times you'll have, like ... or our student union, Plemmons Student Union has all terazzo floors.

Dave Blanks: Under my feet, here in the basement of Anne Belk Hall, it is terrazzo. There's a carpet tile over it, but it's terrazzo.

Matt Dull: It is so durable. It'll be there to the day you demo that building. When we think about like a central lobby of a residence hall, we really don't want to have that throughout the entire building. It doesn't really feel homey. So you almost don't want it in like in your room, or in the hallway in front of your rooms, but that central lobby area, it gets so much wear and tear, right? You've got move-in day, every little person's box and chair and little carts to pull in stuff — all that's going through that main lobby. You know, people are dragging stuff on it and all of our mail, all of our packages, all that stuff is kind of going through that central area. And then, you know, every student in the building is kind of walking and moving through that area every day. So, for that real central core part, we really like to do more of a much more durable finish and terrazzo just, it makes it so easy to ... easy to clean, easy to resurface. And it's a little more expensive surface, but it is so much more durable than putting in carpet or like an LVT solution that would need to be replaced a lot more frequently. And that terrazzo is going to be there for the life of that building. And we're not going to have to worry about replacing it. So it works great for those central areas. Also people's like dirt and salt and stuff on their shoes, terrazzo handles really well. So it's great for that kind of main entrance into the building.

Dave Blanks: Here's a cool little piece of trivia.

Matt Dull: Terrazzo fact?

Dave Blanks: One of the most famous terrazzo walkways, or whatever you want to call it, would be the Hollywood Walk of Fame that ...

Matt Dull: Oh, yeah! It's like red, isn't it?

Dave Blanks: ... with the stars. It's like a black. It's that those terrazzo colors like speckled. The stars themselves are kind of like a reddish, almost like an orange sort of red, whatever that color would be. It looks like Georgia clay, is what it reminds me of. But yeah, it ... that's pretty cool. I didn't know that. So you can see it on exterior stuff, too. All right. Terrazzo talk, with Matt and Dave! Where else do you want to go?

Matt Dull: Well, we'll save the terrazzo trivia questions for next week. So, the outside of Laurel Creek Hall, if we think about the, we're really finishing up the interior of the building. Right now we're also focusing on the outside of the building, pouring site walls. So if we think, you know, just little, little walls that help provide kind of separation from different areas of the outside spaces, or on the front of the building, there's an ADA ramp up to the building and that has a site wall. All of that is going to be covered with that elk stone veneer, that elk stone, kind of granite-looking stone that we use throughout campus. So that's going to be installed to those site walls here in the next few weeks. We're also grading and forming the sidewalks here this week and a little bit last week, and then be ready to kind of pour those sidewalks next week. Brick pavers are getting ready to go into the courtyard area of the building. And then we're also, right now, working on leveling the circle at Trivette Hall. There's a big traffic circle right outside of Trivette Hall, kind of between Trivette and Newland. And now, you know Laurel Creek Hall will kind of make up a third building around that traffic circle. And it, just like everything in Boone, it's all, you know, it's all like uphill. Like it's a weird, like, you're at a traffic circle, but it has, you know, like a 4% or 5% grade differential, right?

Dave Blanks: There is a slant, yeah.

Matt Dull: There's a slant, right?

Dave Blanks: Yeah. If you set a golf ball on it, it would pick up, like, some considerable speed by the time it got down to the curb.

Speaker 2: It's going to end up in Rivers Street.

Dave Blanks: Exactly.

Matt Dull: So we're actually re-leveling that entire surface and putting in some ADA handicap spaces in that area as well and make it more accessible in that space. I mean that's been the big part of the project, too, is we think about them as just buildings, but at the same time, you're creating all of these accessible pathways into that entire section of campus, including parking spaces that are accessible to the building. So, it's kind of exciting to be able to address some of our campus accessibility issues at the same time when you're building residence halls or a parking deck. This is part of that, kind of leveling out that circle, creating more accessible parking spaces in that area. So, pouring the curb and gutter kind of this week and next week and getting everything ready to do that kind of paving and kind of final pave for that. We'll also be working kind of through the month of June. The contractor will be kind of paving their way out. So, once kind of Trivette Circle is done, we'll actually start kind of backing up and doing kind of a final paving all the way back up to the new parking deck. And then from that new parking back all the way back up to Jack Branch Road, kind of all of that's going to be paid over the next month and give it a nice final clean street surface all the way from Jack Branch down to Trivette Hall, and then also over to our parking deck. We've done a lot of paving along the way, but it ends up kind of patchwork because you pave to give you access to a part of the building, and then we got to tear it up to do a utility or this or that. And so, now it's time to just pave our way out of the site. That'll be happening kind of the month of June and maybe the first week or so of July of kind of paving out of the sites. That's also exciting to get that part done. We've had also to think through, there's so many utilities that go through that — domestic water, steam lines, electrical, fiber, telephone. We've had to work through moving a lot of this stuff over the past couple of years to be ready for this last phase, so we don't start messing up all of the work, you know, that the team spent the past three years working on.

Dave Blanks: It's planning. Perfect planning.

Matt Dull: Yeah. You just start to see kind of all the stuff that was done, you know, a year ago or two years ago, kind of line up kind of perfectly as we kind of paved the way out.

Dave Blanks: Don't you love it when a plan comes together like that?

Matt Dull: I love it when a plan comes together!

Dave Blanks: Where else do you want to go today, Matt?

Matt Dull: Well we can cross Stadium Drive and go over to New River Hall, which is the fourth building that we will be opening up for a fall of 2022. (thump) Hello.

Dave Blanks: What'd you do?

Matt Dull: I dropped my notes.

Dave Blanks: It feels like it's almost ready to be open, (heavier thud) like looking at it. What happened now?

Dave Blanks: Matt, are you OK?

Matt Dull: Sorry. Sorry.

Dave Blanks: It's an exciting day. I mean, you know, it's been a little while since we've done one, so it's, you know, you gotta ease back into it.

Matt Dull: Yeah. I got to get my kind of get back in the groove.

Dave Blanks: There's been so much progress across the street at New River Hall. It's like pretty mind blowing. So, when we last left off talking about it, well, they had the elevator shafts. I don't know that we had the cranes on the site yet.

Matt Dull: We had some smaller cranes on-site that would help with putting the elevator shafts up or kind of getting material. But the large crane came on-site, probably been about three weeks, to help with the framing piece. And really we had to put in, I guess since the last podcast, we've actually done the structural steel for the building. So that's when we brought in the crane is to actually start putting in some of the large structural steel that helps create load bearing that we need or kind of a skeleton that you're kind of building off of. We started the wood framing a couple of weeks ago. Got one entire floor done on the side that's closest to Rivers Street, and now we're working on the second story. That second story is actually the ground floor for kind of the central core of the building. So that second floor will be kind of the front of the building closest to Rivers Street, and then the main entrance of the building that's really parallel to Stadium Drive.

Dave Blanks: It's got that Stadium entrance right there. That's the second floor.

Matt Dull: And then there's another, like when you get to the third floor, there's another ground floor, which is really over at kind of where Justice originally was and Gardner/Coltrane. That'll be a third ground floor. Actually the bottom floor of that little wing is where all of our staff live. It'll be staff apartments, our faculty-in-residence apartments, and they'll all have exterior entrances into the building because they live there all year. They're professional staff. A lot of them have family, partners, children, and they actually have a separate entrance into the building. They can get into the building pretty quickly, you know, they have what looks like any other door down the hallway, but they also, you know, since they live there, they have exterior entrances. So that'll have kind of basically an interest that gets them right to a parking lot, kind of where the old Justice Parking Lot was. That'll be kind of that third ground floor. So, it's an interesting kind of building, it kind of works its way up the hill. We're trying to use every possible, you know, square foot on the site we can to get as many beds onto the site.

Dave Blanks: Yeah. It definitely goes down a little further than I had pictured because when we were talking about where Orion is, beside the Garwood building, there was that stairway that goes up, you know, up that hill right there. You know what I'm talking about. I wonder if our listeners do. And I was like, "Hey, are they going to keep that stairway?" And you were like, "Yeah, they'll keep that." I mean, and they did keep a section of it, but another section of it is building, much of it is.

Matt Dull: Yeah, it will have to be rerouted a little bit. Yeah, it'll continue to exist. There will be a path there. But, yeah,

Dave Blanks: But it's much shorter to get to the building, you know, and it's right there. Yeah. So. Big change. A lot of good progress and cranes on-site and they're looking busy. What ... are they, I guess, are they done with the steam vault or whatever it was called?

Matt Dull: Yeah. Most of the steam work is done. You know, you now kind of wait until you actually get the steam room inside the building created ... framed and created, and then once that happens, then you'll kind of pull that steam line from the manhole or the vault into the building. And then you create a steam room inside the building, which has, you know, that's where all your heat exchangers are for your hot water in the building. We also use it to heat water to be able to do our HVAC system in the building. So yeah, that's a little bit later in the process, but the underground part, or the underground utility of the steam, is substantially complete. It's basically done until it's time to connect it to the building.

Dave Blanks: They had to fabricate that thing on the spot.

Matt Dull: Yeah. A lot of it is fabricated there. I mean, it's really interesting.

Dave Blanks: Maybe to you!

Both: (Laughing)

Matt Dull: Because it's steam and it's a pressurized steam system, I mean they do things like they actually go through and have to X-ray the welds once you weld it on-site and to make sure that you have good welds in place before you pressurize that steam system. If you think about it, you know, steam is extremely hot. It's extremely dangerous. If you have a a system that's not installed properly.

Dave Blanks: Bad things, man.

Matt Dull: Yeah. So it's a pretty intensive process. There's a brilliant sense of installation process. A lot of that is done on-site. So, a lot is prefab — the pipes themselves — but so much is done actually physically on-site. So welded all together and yeah, it's a process.

Dave Blanks: That is wild. Yeah. I never thought about X-raying a weld. What else do you want to discuss today, Matt? Anything else?

Matt Dull: The last thing is we are moving forward, you know, as we get into the summer to start working on our demo for Gardner/Coltrane. So Gardner/Coltrane will be coming down. Really the demolition, what most people will see with the building starting coming down is going to be in the fall and really starting at the end of the summer. So, we're moving furniture out right now. That kind of thing.

Dave Blanks: It's not going to have an implosion or anything?

Matt Dull: No it's going to be like a mechanical demolition. So there won't be an implosion or anything like that. No big moment.

Dave Blanks: Oh, well.

Matt Dull: They'll be spending the next few months moving all of our furniture. There's other useful equipment. There's Wi-Fi routers and network switches and all sorts of stuff in the building, that still have a little useful life. We'll pull that and use that in other places on campus. Once all that's done, they'll also do kind of a hazardous material abatement. You know, there's always stuff in every building that you demolish that you just don't want to end up going to a landfill, that has a more specialized, either recycling program you have to do, or other kind of specialized landfill. So that all has to come out before we can start actually demoing the building. Abatement will kind of happen this summer, moving out equipment. Also when it comes to furniture, you have to move out all of the beds, all the dressers and desks and tables and all the stuff that's in the building. That's all wrapped up; actually, that got finished last week. So, yeah, so we'll just kind of keep moving to that. And then more of the, what people will see as a demolition will probably be more likely in summer and fall.

Dave Blanks: Where's the furniture go? Where's that stuff go?

Matt Dull: So we use it a lot of the furniture just in other places on ... in residence halls. We'll use some of the furniture that's in good shape. We'll actually replace, kind of rotate out some of the older furniture in residence halls. Some of it will go to state surplus. We are a state entity, and when we have items that we are done with, they may still have a little useful life within them, and we actually turn those over to the state surplus office and they actually do more like a public bid process.

Dave Blanks: Yeah. You could buy, you know, some chairs maybe if you wanted to. Potentially. Yeah.

Matt Dull: You know, and ultimately, some of those items may just be recycled or final disposal, but a lot of those items may have another useful life somewhere else based on people bidding on it and taking them home with them or doing another kind of project somewhere.

Dave Blanks: I still know where you can find bricks from Justice, but there's a note on them that says we're saving them for somebody. So, yeah. I can't hook you up, listener, with a Justice brick. Yeah. Even some of the bricks got a second life.

Matt Dull: Yeah. Well, and you know, there's so much recycling in demolition of buildings now that the, you know, all the material ... a lot, so much of the material is actually recycled.

Dave Blanks: That's an industry unto itself.

Matt Dull: It really is. Between your metal recycling ... there's so much metal on these kind of buildings. And then even things like the brick and things like that, people will reuse it as different types of fill or all sorts of stuff. So, there's a lot that actually gets reused in a demolition.

Dave Blanks: I like to see that. We don't want to see anything wasted.

Matt Dull: Yeah.

Dave Blanks: Well, Matt, thanks for your time, sir. We'll do it again. And it won't be such a large break between Campus Construction Updates the next time. I know you were, you were probably missing it, so yeah, I'm glad we got to do it. Thank you, sir. Have a good day.

Matt Dull: All right. Thanks, Dave. Take care.