December 7, 2006
Campus scavenging paid off for renovated Southwest Maintenance Zone
The front desk came from the law school, the carpeting in the back from Housing and Food Services. Shelving in another room was rescued from the junk pile, while the table in the break room once sat in someone’s conference room. At the Southwest Maintenance Zone’s new headquarters, everything old is new again.
The Southwest Maintenance Zone, which is responsible for repairs and maintenance for the oceanography and marine sciences buildings and for all the residence halls and restaurants on campus, moved into a newly renovated building next to the West Campus Child Care Center on Nov. 30, but it took a lot of sweat equity and scrounging for used materials to make it happen.
You wouldn’t know that to look at it, however. The front desk in the lobby is an impressive curved piece that looks as if it was designed for the space. The colorful chairs are comfortable, and the whole area is filled with light. Not bad for a cinder block building that began life as a milk distribution center and sat empty for four years after the University Records Center moved out.
The building had been designated for the Southwest Zone’s use, manager John Carroll explained, but the project was put on hold after it was discovered the building needed earthquake retrofitting and the design work already completed would have to be scrapped. Then the previous manager left and there was no one to keep things going.
By the time Carroll arrived in 2004, progress was at a standstill. But he looked around at his crew’s cramped and inaccessible accommodations in the basement garage of Terry Lander and decided there had to be a way to get the renovations done. “One of the first things I did after I got here was to order a sign for the building,” he said.
His faith was rewarded. Not long after, Jerri McCray, then associate vice president for facilities services, found money for the structural upgrade and for other basic improvements to the building. But, Carroll said, there was no money for furniture, fixtures or equipment. That’s when he started visiting the Surplus Property Warehouse.
“Somebody told me I could get good deals there, so I started going on a regular basis,” Carroll said. “It got to the point where folks down there would call me and say, ‘Hey, I got something for your building.'”
The empty building then became a place to store things. Carroll picked up desks, chairs, bookshelves, lamps. He was able to buy a set of lockers for the zone’s locker rooms for $50 after the department that purchased them discovered they were the wrong size. The same lockers new would have gone for $7,000 to $10,000, Carroll said. He got an old map case to use for storing building plans, then attached a large table top to it so the plans could be spread out. At one point he discovered a set of splintered old shelves lying on a loading dock about to be sent off as wood waste. These were repaired and are now mounted on the walls in the room with the map case.
Because there was little money for design services, Carroll designed the break room using software from Ikea. The appliances and fixtures were purchased there and installed by his staff, all for under $4,000. In fact, Carroll was greatly aided in his effort to save money by the fact that his staff includes painters, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and metal workers. Their skills made it easy to do things like altering furniture to fit the space.
And save money he did. The original 2003 estimate for furniture, fixtures and equipment was $185,000. Carroll said he actually spent less than $30,000. Yet the space is attractive and functional — much more functional than the unit’s previous space.
“We were grateful that HFS was able to provide it for us, but it was very small,” he said. “There was almost no shop space, so our people operated out of vans, and any fabrication had to be done elsewhere. It was also in an area that was not open to the public, so it was hard for other people in Facilities Services to get in when they wanted to talk to us.”
The new building includes a flexible shop area that allows several trades to work in the same space by rolling materials out, using them and then putting them away again. Leads of all the trade areas have offices close to each other so they can easily confer. Administrators and support staff are just across the hall and accessible.
Carroll claims the building is almost prototypical for a unit of this type. “If Facilities Services had the space and the resources, they’d probably try to do this elsewhere,” he said.
For now, he’s just glad to see the Southwest Zone staff happily settled in their new digs. Without the used materials and staff labor, the total renovation cost had been estimated at $1.5 million. Instead, it came in at more like $900,000.
“We’ve saved money and we’ve kept materials out of the waste stream,” Carroll said. “That’s a good feeling.”
