Ah, a little bit of hard construction work feels good once in a while. In this case, it was a fun weekend of demolition. Ralph, a great friend of mine, has been running a hookah lounge in Reading for almost two years. He's been looking to move into Lancaster, PA, and found the perfect property about a month ago to open his second place. We talked about the options after acquiring the blueprints from the city, I made a few sketch-up designs to show an architect and the city. Permits approved and we were ready to roll.
This weekend we started renovating the large property in downtown Lancaster. It's a 3500 SqFt property that had around 6 offices that needed to be removed. They were all non-load bearing, steel-frame construction, so they came down easily once we figured out how to do it properly. You can see from the pictures that there was a lot of steel, wood, and drywall that came out of it
Now as I've stated before, I'm keeping documenting stuff here to track my progress into the Sustainable Design Program and beyond. The whole time I've been on site I've been looking for ways to minimize our trash, and use less new materials to rebuild the place. I was able to salvage enough steel studs to create a small office with the scraps, the only thing we needed to purchase was the track pieces. The rest will be recycled. The trim and wood will be re-used where possible. The drywall is pretty much a lost cause, I don't know of anything that can be done with it off the top of my head. Any ideas are welcome. So this is the project for the next few weeks. I'm looking forward to publishing more.
