We wanted to take a moment to give you an update regarding Hope Planted and the building renovations. Just last week the elders approved the Schematic Design budget. This is the budget breakdown based on the various subcontractor bids for each area of the project (plumbing, electrical, mechanical, finishes, etc.). The cost came in higher than anticipated, so it took a few weeks to get the numbers back into an acceptable range. This meant that we needed to make some tweaks to the original design in order to make up for some of the unanticipated cost increases. Most of the changes to the design will go unnoticed because they had to do with design elements that were not observable in the original photo renderings.
However, the most noticeable change to the original design is the reduction of the wood-look slats on the exterior of the building. The original design called for wrapping 3 sides of the building in these slats. Reducing the number of slats provided us tremendous cost savings opportunity in phase 1 that allowed us to get the total cost of phase 1 closer to our original budget. You can see the updated phase 1 exterior design in the photos posted below. We can add more of the slatted look in phase 2 if necessary.
The good news is that we are ready to move forward with the renovations! Demolition is scheduled to start on November 26th. The added time it took to rework the budget has pushed our move-in date out a few weeks to the end of June 2019. This is okay because we are still looking at an early summer move-in date.
Please continue to pray as many details and decisions are still to be made.
