Brexton’s Post

Transcript

I remember getting a call from my son and saying, Oh my gosh, did you see that storm that tore part of that building down over in West Bell? Tornado or something came by and blew it down. Boy, that's going to be a nice project for somebody. And I laughed and I said, yeah, probably will. And the next morning I got a call from an ex partner of mine who had a relationship with the building owner. And the building owner called him because he knew he was from Columbus and asked for the name of a contractor. He gave him my name. So it was a large insurance claim project. This building was 244,000 square feet, and 48,000 square feet of the near center of it got ripped to shreds by a microburst tornado. And so we were invited to go look at the building. It's an insurance claim. So they had to have three proposals. That insurance company required them to have three proposals. And we went to the building and it was a warehouse distribution building for United Stationers and there was no roof over 48,000 square feet of this building. It was just exposed. So they already had an emergency contractor. They're building a. 30 foot high plywood wall covered with Visqueen to keep any other rain from coming out than they had a temporary roof. Stretched over that and we got there to do a walkthrough with the owner. And we walked through and we had assembled a team of design build team. We had an architect, engineers with subcontractors there to get them involved early. And we walked through the space and you could see where things have been pulled from the wall. The sprinkler system was dangling from parts where the roof was gone and it blew out the precast walls into the exterior parking lot. And so we we walk through and we're standing on this slab looking up at the sky. And I asked the owner, I said, do you have any existing plans for this building? And he said, Nope, what you see is what we got. And he said, how quick can you get me a proposal? And I said, well, you know, we could give you a proposal today, but you probably wouldn't like our number. But if you give us a week from tomorrow, this was on a Thursday. If you give us a week from tomorrow, we can have a pretty good idea of what it's going to take to put this back for you. So we actually put three people out there in the field and then two of us in the office worked on a proposal for them, four or five days straight field, measuring, texting photographs back and forth and coming up with a detailed 8 page proposal with allowances of what we thought it was going to take for them to put that. Back together? And they had terms in the lease which allowed the tenant to walk if they didn't have it done in a certain time frame. So they required us to be done by December 20th. And I said we can be done by September or by December 20th if you sign our contract by August 20th and they signed our contract on September 20th and we turned the space over to them on November 19th. So we finished a month early. We put that 48,000 square feet back together like new, we coordinated with their tenants so their tenant could actually set up their racks and. Get everything going in cooperation with our trades so we were able to get it done a month early so. We actually had a meeting with the city of Columbus to get the inspectors involved and it was a really complex, arduous process. But it was so exciting to be involved again in a project that gives you the opportunity to really do something like that because those are few and far between.