Getting the bricks in place

The masons began reconstructing the walls on Friday and you can see the new brick now being put into place. This coming week should see some more visible progress after some slower, more tedious, time-consuming work over the last week. We continue to pray for God’s blessings on the next several weeks as we prepare for the new school year. We’ll keep you posted on the progress!

A ton of bricks

Actually, I don’t know how much it weighs, but it is heavy. A shipment of brick arrived today which will be used on the new facade of the building. The new brick, together with the new windows and curtain-wall will mean that the east and west sides of the building will be completely new when the repair is finished.
For those interested in masonry, the brick used in the school’s original construction is a size known as “Norwegian” brick, measuring 3 ½” x 2 ¾” x 11 5/8″. I don’t know how it got its name, but the new brick will match the color and size of the original brick, so that the building maintains a uniform look where the old and new meet.
For those who are really into our new Norwegian brick, here’s how you say brick in Norwegian: murstein (Thanks to dictionary.com)

A room with a view

This past Friday the members of our Parish Pastoral Council and School Board were given a walk-through of the building repair and a offered a chance to see the work up close. This picture is a view out of a classroom on the second floor, overlooking Harrison Hall. If you look closely at the roof of Harrison Hall you may notice it looks a little neater than before: a number of old, non-functioning air conditioning units and equipment were removed last week. While it seems like a small thing, it is just one more step in the right direction as we try to care for the buildings around our campus and improve the overall appearance.

"We can rebuild him — we have the technology."

Better. Stronger. Faster
If this were Jeopardy and the category was “70′s TV Shows”, then the correct question would be: “What is ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’?” In this case, it’s our school building, and the price tag will end up in the neighborhood of $3 million. But the result will be a building that has, in many ways, been rebuilt from the inside out. As you can see from today’s photos, the crew reached the point where there is nothing left but the new structural steel units after the brick and masonry was removed. In the second photo you can see that the steel appears to have been painted white – it’s actually the intumescent coating, a special fire-retardant barrier that is applied to the structural steel, and is part of the standard safety measures used in building.
For more $6 Million Dollar Man trivia, click here.

Waiting in the wings…

The structural work on the outside of the building is continuing, making progress toward the installation of the “curtain-wall” system (what’s that?) and new windows (seen here in the photo). Meanwhile, inside the building work is being done on the boiler and pipes, getting things ready for the unit ventilators that will deliver heat and fresh air into the classrooms in a more efficient and dependable way. Once the structural components are finished on the outside of the building we should begin to see even more visible changes – stay tuned!

Really big sparklers

The fireworks continued on Monday, even after the holiday weekend officially ended, as workers prepared the window bays for the next step.
These sparks are a little bigger than what you might get from the sparklers you buy at a roadside fireworks stand, at least the ones here in Maryland.
For those who are familiar with the drive down south aloong I-95 and the fireworks stands that line the exits, this logo may look familiar (as one of three boys in the back seat during family trips down to Florida, it brings back many memories…):

Up, up, and away…

This past week the final pieces of structural steel were put in place on the west side of the building. Now it’s off to the east side where all of the window bays have been prepared to receive the same units in the coming week.
The crane was a familiar site this week, so we decided to try the old Krazy Glue test and see if it really is strong enough to suspend a construction worker whose hat is stuck to a steel beam using a single drop of Instant Krazy Glue…
(Disclaimer: we didn’t really try this, neither Fr. Arnold nor Fr. Larry were brave enough to test it out…)

"Ask for a sign…"

No, this isn’t the beginning of the passage you know so well from Isaiah (which we hear in Advent, and more recently on the Feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Help), it’s just something you’ll see when you drive onto campus this Sunday for Mass. In order to help guide visitors (and parishioners) around the campus during construction, a number of directional signs have been installed, just to make it a little clearer where to go. Things remain on schedule for the building repair and our hope is that come September we will have our normal traffic flow back again.