Hello all,
It’s been a while since my last update, so here is the latest on our hallway project. Things have been slowly progressing as we have had time to work on them.
After reviewing vendor quotes to change our furnace duct work, we decided that we didn’t really care for the designs or prices we were being quoted and we opted to do the work ourselves. To save a little on the materials for the hallway project in general, we were waiting for Menards 11% sale which started in mid-February. Once that started we special ordered some of the needed duct work and we ordered the tin for pieces we were custom making from Russell steel in Duluth as well ahead of the expected 25%+ price increases from the Trump tariffs on steel. That all came in last week, so this week we started on the duct work move. On Monday, we shut off the upstairs furnace and removed the duct work all the way back to the furnace. We then reconfigured it (using all of the new parts and about half of the older parts) to raise it all to run over the beam. Today we finished all the upstairs feeds and the furnaces are back working normally. The two feeds to the kitchen area (one from each furnace) will still need to be completed. I have attached some pictures so you can see that we could now mount a standard height entrance door to the furnace and Men’s bathroom area, and how little space the new duct takes in the kitchen wall as compared the old ducts.
Our total cost for materials was $545.81 for this work. We believe we not only saved ~$3400 but we also have a much better design. It was noted by people at tonight’s Lenten service that the new arrangement allows more airflow, which should be less stress on the furnace blower motors and slightly more efficient heating, as the furnace can now move more warm air in less time.
One of the things we found when the ductwork was removed is that the installers of the oldest part of the ductwork (dating back to the coal furnace) had improperly cut off the floor joists and left them hanging free when they installed the duct on the pulpet side. As you can see, a new load distributing purlin was installed while we had access to this area. That should help to stiffen the rear floor, which of course supports the balcony, which transmits the load from the bell tower. Maybe things will shake a little less now when we ring the bell…..
Finally, Bill was able to take some time to move the hallway door further down the hallway (as much as possible without interfering with other doors) and change the swing from towards the front of the church to towards the back. This came out pretty nice so I recommend you check it out and send a thank you his way for the nice work. That was another savings on this project as we were able to re-use the existing door.
We expect to patch the kitchen walls and start in on some of the prep work for the tile and ramp next as weather and time permits. You will see that we picked up the new sheet rock and some of the ceiling gris steel already as well. Since most of US sheetrock is imported from Canada, we bought that ahead of the Trump tariffs as well since it seems unlikely the price of any of these items will fall in the coming months.
As always, Thank You for your continued patience and support.
David