Nine months ago this was two teaching labs that hadn't been touched in about thirty years. We put up a clip back in February when the whole thing was studs and conduit and you couldn't really tell what you were looking at. Here's that one.
They're done now.
We took it down to the shell
Full demo. Everything out.
That's the only way to do a lab that old. Once you open it up you find that almost nothing in there was built for what a chemistry program does today, and you're better off starting over than trying to make thirty-year-old systems play along with new ones.
Eight hoods, and everything that feeds them
There are eight fume hoods across the two rooms. Every one of them has cold water, natural gas, compressed air and vacuum run to it, so a student can set up and run an experiment without stepping away from the hood. Behind all eight is a stainless steel exhaust system that pulls the fumes and pushes them straight outside. That's the whole point of a hood, and it's why the room is safe to teach in.
Most of what we did in here you can't see anymore. The hoods are the part people notice. The exhaust runs, the gas lines, the vacuum, the electrical feeding all of it, that went into walls and above ceilings in a thirty-year-old building that had to keep running while we worked in it.
I could talk about these electrical boxes for four hours
When we were shooting the walkthrough somebody asked me what else we should cover. I said I could talk about the electrical boxes in this room for four hours, everything it took to get them in and where they all had to land, and there's nothing in that for social media.
Which is about right. A lot of this job is like that.
We had plenty of problems on this one, too. You do on any nine month job, and especially on a remodel where you're working around a building that's still full of people. But it came together and the rooms look great.
Working on a campus is its own animal
This is our second project at SUU, after the campus store.
The deadline isn't a date somebody picked in a meeting. It's the first day of the semester, and there's no version of this where you hand it over late.
The college was straightforward with us the whole way through and they're happy with how it turned out. We were glad to get the call.
If you've got a commercial project coming up, here's what else we've built. Or call us at (435) 375-4205.
