This Summer’s Building Work

Outside – The Board of Trustees approved expanding the sidewalk and lighting improvements project started last year with additional lamp posts and new concrete paths all the way to the bulkhead from the basement on the playground side of the Parish Hall. The new pathway to the bulkhead will ensure a safe exit in an emergency during the winter as we will be able to have it shoveled when there is significant snow. There will be three additional lamp posts along the Washington St. face of the building for better visibility. The one part of the pathway in front of the Alliance Room that will not be replaced is where our masterplan calls for a new accessible ramp. We do not yet have funds for that project which includes re-building the stairs and landing to the Parish Hall to eliminate the threshold barrier there. We also installed a new dry well at the back door so that the drain there will not back up and ice the walk this winter.

Inside – This summer we sanded the Parish Hall floor and are trying a new high traffic coating there. We repaired the plaster and painted the Headstart Room on the second floor. With the help of the Community Breakfast fund collected by Ron Margolin, we installed a new sprayer faucet and deep sink in the kitchen. We removed the 1950s cabinets in one first floor classroom and installed closets in that space. Making more storage space on the first floor for our preschool tenant made the second floor Headstart Room closet available for the Sunday School class that will meet there this year. We took the old cabinets out of the closet in the Alliance Room and put 20 folding chairs there so anyone who needs more chairs for a meeting can simply open that closet and find them. Please put them back when you are done. We did some major maintenance to the heating and air conditioning system with improvements/replacements to controls and pumps and valves to get us through the year in good shape with better control over heating and cooling.

Building Envelope – We got repaired leaded windows back in the second floor kitchen and sent a few Headstart Room windows out for similar rebuilding. The plan is for all the Headstart Room windows to be repaired this year. Only some of them will be operable as people tend to leave them open and that is a safety problem as well as a maintenance issue. operations council (continued)

Current Projects – We expect to replace the deteriorating floor in the new basement classroom shortly. We just had an energy audit and hope to get new LED ceiling fixtures in all the classrooms and the first floor kitchen at a very reduced cost, replacing the current fluorescent fixtures. We have the roofer coming to do slate replacement for old broken slates in various places on our roof. If funds permit, we will add a light over the new kitchen sink and replace the broken bubbler in the spring. Landscaping all the new pathways will be studied in the spring and part of the next fiscal year budget.