Church Groundbreaking Set

This information was published in the  restoration news center on July 26, 2012:

By Rev. Dr. Barry Cass

The biggest news this week is that the date for the Groundbreaking has been set!  Mark your calendar for Sunday, September 23 at 4 P.M.  We will gather on the site of the Meeting House and celebrate the beginning of construction.  The full details of the Celebration will be forthcoming, but the date and time are firm.  Once the Groundbreaking has taken place work will begin on the site to get ready for the foundation and other concrete work as the beginning of the building process.  It seems to have been a long time coming, but we have been working steadily to reach this moment.

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Work has been done with the many items that have been in storage with ServPro since the fire.  In the days immediately after the fire salvageable items were taken from the Office and Bugbee wings and stored in a warehouse.  Some of the items have been brought back in the past few months and now we are getting the bulk of the remaining items back.  There are more than thirty boxes to be sorted through.  There are things from every room on the bottom floor of both the Bugbee and Office wings.  Most of the stuff needs to be cleaned before it can be put away.  Because the Office wing is not open yet storage will be at a premium.

There is still a storage trailer in the church parking lot.  It contains items from the Office and Bugbee wings that have been deemed unsalvageable.  The trailer is there because the insurance company may send someone to inspect the contents in order to determine the value to be covered.  We hope to have this all sorted out with the insurance company in the near future.

This week we saw the beginning of work on the data and voice installation and the end of the work on the first phase of the fire alarm installation.  The final installation of each of these will be done once the sheet rock has been done.

We are waiting for the OK from the insurance company to move ahead with the construction of the new firewall.  Everything else to be done in the Office wing is waiting on that.  There will be about two weeks of work to be done taking down the wall that is there and putting up a new wall.  Once that is completed we can move ahead with sheet rocking, painting, flooring installation and final installation of the voice, data and alarm systems.  The temporary boiler and its fuel supply will be installed once the wall is up too.

Tom Moriarty began dissembling the steps in the Memorial Garden and will soon be removing a portion of the wall and then reworking the bank that is left to prevent erosion during the building process.  In the course of site work and building the present gas tank will be moved and a new in-ground oil tank will be installed.

The Building Committee is working hard to coordinate the work done by the estimator, the insurance company’s adjuster, and the construction manager so that we can reach an accurate settlement of our claim.  This involves many hours of work by members of the committee and by representatives of both the architect and the construction manager.

Remember to mark your calendar for 4 P.M. September 23 for the Ground Breaking!