a view from the house of theatre one. the trenches mark the interior walls. More pics in our Week 2 Gallery

OK, we don't have "walls" per se. What we are doing this week is creating a space in which walls can exist. In essence, the entire building is bisected along the north/south axis with one huge wall that separates Theaters 1 and 2 from the public spaces and Theater 3. The ditch that the crew is working in on the left is where the dressing rooms will be. The longer trench marks the position of the largest primary wall. The roof of the building is quite high (as much as 24' above grade at its top), so these walls are going to be quite big and heavy. In addition, they need to be pretty serious about sound insulation from the lobby and the other space. There are a lot of different wall construction techniques we are using in the new building.

The key insulating walls are being built out of concrete block and dry wall. This combination is cheaper than six layers of dry wall to achieve the same sound insulation factor, but is also heavier due to all the concrete. To keep these walls from shifting (and toppling), they get anchored to the floor with metal rods sunk into the ground with new concrete poured around them to keep the entire wall immobile. So, the steps are as follows:

1 Cut into the concrete slab so we make space for the anchors
2 Set the anchors and pour new concrete around them
3 Build the concrete block walls on the anchors
4 Put drywall and insulation around the concrete walls.

So, this week was spent cutting the trenches for the anchors. Actually, most of this week was also taken up by our continuing difficulties with the floor. After completing the survey, we found that the existing floor essentially ripples up and down like crazy. There is a 10" difference between the topmost point and the lowest, and it doesn't slope evenly to a single point. Further complicating the issue is that fixing it will require three different types of material: two different types of concrete and something called Laserflow. You use the different grades of material depending on the depth you are trying to even. So, for areas less than 1 1/2" deep you can use concrete (the cheapest). Any shallower and the gravel in the concrete is too likely to protrude, so you go to a finer grade. Finally, for the 1/2" areas, concrete variants won't do it as they are too likely to crack when poured that thin, so you use this other product called Laserflow which spreads like a paste but dries like concrete.

Of course, all these different products have different (and increasing) prices. And it's a lot of area. We estimate that we will need 6200 square feet of material to even the floor out. Even concrete, the cheapest, is about $3/square foot. Do the math, and it will cost about $21,000 to raise the whole slab, even if we go to great lengths to only use the more expensive materials where we must. Trent is going to reduce the amount of concrete required by cutting styrofoam blocks in the deeper areas and pouring the concrete over it, a standard industry practice, but even then we estimate the cost of our materials to be about $16,000. Included in our fixed bid was $4,000 in repairs for the slab, but that leaves the theatre with the remaining $11,000.

Hopefully when the job is costed, we can get the price closer to $2.85/square foot since there are cost savings as the contractor doesn't need to mobilize additional staff or equipment to pour _more_ concrete. Even so, that leaves the theatre with $10,000 of cash that we haven't budgeted. Hmmmmm....

Fortunately, our electrical bid was made without acknowledgement of our being tax-exempt. As we re-estimate it, the savings on the equipment purchases from same will be between $7,000 and $9,000. That brings us within spitting distance, so I'm going to put the cost overrun of this little item at $4,000 for the moment.

We also got a rough cost for the new iron pipe we found out about last week at $2,000. As I look, the extra time it took us to survey the floor has eaten up a day, plus one day lost due to late construction. I am told we are now two days behind, but that it will be made up next week. We'll see :)

Current score
Weeks in Construction: 2
Money committed/spent: $180,000
Days Behind: 2
Over Budget: $6,000

Look, we found an old van under the mainstage! (not really). At this point, we can really examine the entire building to look for fun surprises.

Surprise #1: The floor!

The floor in the Bailiwick is remarkably uneven. We had noticed an decided slope in the hallway to the back of the building. Once we pulled out the walls, we could see that the floor was far more uneven than we had anticipated. The concrete guys mapped out a grid using cool little laser devices to check elevations. As it turns out, the floor has a variance of over 7 1/2" from its lowest to its highest point. But it's not an even grade, oh no. The floor bucks and twists, with whole portions raised above the grade, like this picture which is where the entrance to the mainstage used to be.

Conceivably, we could break up the concrete and repour the floor, or we can give up those 7 1/2" and raise the entire base. Our GC believes that the latter will be a small incremental cost, and one he will absorb as part of his bid, so hey--this is not only cheaper, but it solves another problem...

Surprise #2: The Alley, or "Mommy, where's all this water coming from?"

Yes, the alley is higher than the floor. Why do we care? One word: Rain. If we leave this unaddressed, water will pour into theatres 2 and 3 underneath the door every time it rains. Fortunately, by raising the floor and just building in slight rakes for wheelchair access in each entry alcove, we will have our theater safely above street level which should prevent the random flooding the old space was prone to.

Surprise #3: When Measurements Attack!

When Rick (the architect) initially measured the building, he had to make a few assumptions because of lack of access to parts of the buliding filled with debris. One of these assumptions caused us to mis-draft the fire exit door on the back of the building. The existing door will be bisected by the wall separating Theater 2 from the Theater 3 dressing room. Fortunately, this is an optional door. We already had to add additional fire doors for the two spaces on the back of the buliding so we can just brick it in. I don't know how that impacts the plans we put in with the city, but Rick is looking into it.

Surprise #4: Hoffa! At Last!

We uncovered a catchbasin in the center of the building covered by concrete while the plumber was tracing pipes to prevent accidents when we sink the wall supports in. This is the original catchbasin whose purpose is to help filter out silt from the roof drainage. What we discovered was that the existing plumbing lines for the bathrooms run into this catchbasin, which goes a long way to explaining the occasionally rich odors floating up from the restrooms. The upshot is that we are going to have to lay new pipes to the front of the building, about 35 feet. This does add to my cost, so we'll see next week what the incremental cost is.

• Schedule - 1 day behind
• Budget - $0 over, but could be several thousand dollars once we get the plumbing costs.