For a few years now GoodSeed International has been looking for a new home. We are on year 7 of a 5 year lease with a generous friend of the ministry who has been letting us use a building on his property, but we are bursting at the seams for our international office. In Winter 2009, an offer was made by a local businessman to use 3/4 of his building he was finishing in town. We took a look and realized that it would meet our needs for at least a few years. After much thought and prayer, GoodSeed accepted the offer.
In October 2009, we basically shut down many of our operations to begin construction of our future offices. Except for half of the downstairs that is being used by the owner for his water-trucking business, the building was completely empty. Lots of work needed to be done to get it ready for occupation. I traded in my video production hat for a construction hard hat, put on the steel toe boots and tool belt, and got to work.
As a testament to how little most of us know about construction, pretty much all of us bought white hard hats. Apparently only the foreman wears a white hard hat. I had next to no construction experience, so just about everything was new to learn. Framing, insulating, wiring, drywalling, painting… everything needed to be done, and it is a large area to complete. Thankfully, we have had lots of help from others in GoodSeed and the community. Still, it is a big project that has taken many, many hours of work to get it to where we are today.
On the work site, I can usually be found screwing things up. It used to be drywall. I was hanging and screwing up drywall in my sleep after awhile.
Driving the scissors lift to put drywall on the ceiling and walls.
Whose bright idea was it to let me drive something like this?
Lately, I’ve been spending more time screwing other things up, like tin.
The two audio studios and my video studio and editing room take up half of the upstairs! It will be so nice to have a dedicated studio instead of commandeering parts of people’s work stations and warehouse. For the new studios we have used special construction to help soundproof those rooms. The walls all have suspended drywall in the hallways that is not anchored to the frame, and the inside walls of the studios use special (and expensive) QuietRock Soundproof Drywall to further dampen sound.
The exterior of the building as it now stands:
With the drywall now done and the painting underway, the heavy construction is over. The downside of this is that I am running out of excuses for buying tools.. The upside is that we hope to be moving in within a few months with an open house in the summer. This building will give us more than double the current office space we currently use, and with more office space, better warehousing, a real audio recording studio, and new video facilities, we are all looking forward to moving in and the new opportunities it represents in our evangelism ministry at GoodSeed.
Here are some more photos of the process from the start up to now.
