Reaping the Benefits
From Issue No.18 , Page #34 | By Martin Sinderman
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Consider renovating an existing building when it’s time to plant, expand, or simply move your church to a location you want to make your own. The benefits are there. You could well save some money by recycling an existing structure instead of building a new one.
Taking on a well-located but unused facility can also play a small part in keeping in-town areas vibrant and slowing down the pace of urban sprawl. And if you work with the right professionals, you could wind up with the space of your dreams, customized to the wants and needs of your congregation.
Working Smart with a Former Kmart
What to expect on Sunday at His Hands Church in Woodstock, Georgia? According to the church’s website, expect a worship service that’s “God-focused … loud … rockin’ … enthusiastic … all-out for Him.”
Completed in 2006, non-denominational His Hands Church involved the transformation of a vacant, 132,000-square-foot former Kmart retail store on a 13-acre site into a non-traditional church complex. The completed renovation, a project of Dallas, Texas-based Beck Group architecture/construction/development consulting firm, won first place in the design-build renovations category, along with an honorable mention in the sustainability category, of the Georgia Branch of the Associated General Contractors of America’s 2007 “Build Georgia” awards. The facility includes adult worship space for 2,000, a 500-seat youth worship room, and a 300-seat children’s worship room; a nursery, classrooms, and fellowship hall; an indoor playground, outdoor basketball courts, and a coffee shop.
Converting this steel/masonry building from a place to shop to a center for worship entailed numerous upgrades to building systems, particularly those impacting energy efficiency, according to Beck Principal Fred Perpall, AIA, of the firm’s Atlanta office.
“We were also able to add a lot of natural light by cutting new windows into the building skin and using highly energy efficient, Low-E glass,” he continues. The structure’s HVAC also required extensive upgrades, “although we were able to re-use some components, which was positive from a sustainability standpoint—typically, you just go in and rip the old systems out.”
Resources devoted to improving building systems that have an impact on efficient use of energy is money well spent—and pays off well, especially for churches, according to Perpall.
“Even with buildings built as recently as five to seven years ago, the opportunities to upgrade the glass, wall, HVAC, and lighting systems are significant—the technology for each has become much more advanced,” Perpall says.
“Churches tend to own their buildings for a much longer period than our typical commercial type of clients,” Perpall explains. “This makes the potential life-cycle cost payback for a church huge—while a commercial developer may be looking at a five-year holding period, a church is looking [at] living in the building for maybe 20 years, which is a long enough period of time to get tremendous payback.”
Meanwhile, bringing the former Kmart’s audio/visual/lighting (A/V/L) system in line with His Hand’s needs required extensive work.
Raising the Roof
“The culture of this ministry is very presentational—they want their worship experience to look, sound, and feel like a rock concert,” says Perpall.
Creating the right accommodations for this kind of experience required significant expenditures, according to Perpall. Items included absorptive wall treatments for walls and ceilings and an upgrade of the building’s entire electrical infrastructure, “and we also had to cut the roof, raising it by 15 feet to accommodate the sight lines necessary in the main worship space.”
Churches checking out a building’s potential for successful renovation should keep a couple of tips in mind, Perpall adds.
“One of the main things we look for in renovating a building is a structural system that allows for a lot of flexibility. The more intense the structure, the more columns there are in walls and space, the less the flexibility—and the greater the cost to renovate,” he says.
“Also look at the age of the building—the older the building, the more you are going to have to spend to bring its life/safety/handicap access systems up to current building codes,” Perpall notes.
Re-doing the Mall
Like His Hands Church, Heartland Community Church chose to locate in and renovate a retail structure. To accommodate the A/V/L experience in its main worship space, it also raised the roof (in this instance, by 16 feet).
Unlike His Hands, though, this Rockford, Illinois-based, non-denominational church, where four services attract some 7,000 to 8,000 attendees total every weekend, bought a 350,000-square-foot partially enclosed strip center, renovating nearly 150,000 square feet of it for a new home it moved into last year.
Having outgrown a 35,000-square-foot, inner-city facility about two years ago, Heartland originally looked at acquiring a suburban site and building a brand new building, according to Ken Irwin, director of facilities operations for the church. But given a number of factors, “including God’s prompting to move toward more cultural diversity, we decided that we would be much happier with a location closer to the center of town.”
That new location was Colonial Village Mall. Originally constructed in the 1960s and partially enclosed, the mall had been on the decline for several years, according to Irwin.
The mall’s decline came to a halt with Heartland’s acquisition.
“We originally just had our eye on an 80,000-square-foot space formerly occupied by JCPenney,” Irwin recounts. “But we ended up buying the entire mall, including a parking lot, parking deck, and a couple of outbuildings.”
Turning store space into worship space for Heartland Community Church entailed raising and replacing the roof of the former JCPenney space in order to get the proper sight lines in an auditorium that now holds about 1,600; replacing a central HVAC system with more efficient rooftop units that could accommodate zoning within the structure; replacement of all electrical hardware; and installing what Irwin describes as “environmentally friendly fluorescent lighting, with a lot of attention paid to getting the right color tones. We wanted the building to be environmentally friendly, but still have great ambiance.”
Utilizing renovated space in the mall has some other benefits for Heartland, adds Irwin. The church is one of many tenants, which include Hollywood Video, Baskin-Robbins, a business college, and several local restaurants. All tenants share the common area costs of parking lot maintenance and snow plowing. Also, as tenant leases expire, the church has the option of utilizing their spaces for expansion, explains Irwin, “something that is already being discussed, since we’ve been blessed with a doubling of attendance since we’ve moved in the new building.” The biggest challenge Heartland faced in the renovation process was a lack of as-built (or any other kind of) drawings/representations of the existing structure, according to Irwin. “There was no way of knowing where any particular pipe led, or what there was behind a wall or above the ceiling,” he says, adding, “the more you can find out about the structure you’re starting with, the easier the [renovation] process will be.”
Blending in with Beauty
If you’re lucky enough to be working on renovating a building that is blessed with ornamental plastering and/or decorative painting that you wish to save, bringing in a specialist to work with your design professional can help you out immensely.
“This is an aspect of renovation projects that is often overlooked,” according to John Canning, founder and president of Cheshire, Connecticut-based John Canning Painting & Conservation Studios, a specialist in restoring and conserving ornamental plastering and decorative painting. “In many instances, a church will call in an engineer who is not really interested in aesthetics, but just ‘where is this pipe supposed to come out,’” says Canning.
Among other services that they offer, companies such as Canning’s consult with churches and other clients to determine “what are the less-obtrusive areas where penetrations can be made into decorations and artwork, disguising things such as sprinkler systems, and integrating lighting fixtures into ornamental plaster to the point where they are basically invisible—but still able to throw a wash of light across the room,” Canning explains.
In some cases, demolition of artwork is unavoidable. In these instances, “We would document the particular pattern or ornamentation,” Canning says, “ensuring that the client would have enough information to help them eventually reinstate the artwork.”
“It doesn’t cost a lot to have someone like us come for a day, walk through, look at drawings, and meet with the project engineer,” adds Canning Vice President David Riccio. “It’s not a huge investment, but it is one that will help the client ultimately have a much better project.”
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