Friday, 29th May, 2009
More from the archives - Part 1
Another dig into the archives this morning. The current building project is not our first attempt. From 2003 through to mid-2004 we worked on a project that, ultimately, didn't work out.
The church bought the building in late 2002 thanks to many generous gifts from people in the UK. We soon found an architect and he got busy coming up with ideas for how we could transform the building, an old warehouse, into a church. The images below show the final designs.
This is the downstairs. The idea was to add about 5m of new building on to the front of the existing building. That would add almost 50% extra floor space. Classrooms, toilets, kitchen and other bits and pieces would be downstairs. The design was compact and efficient.
Upstairs was to be used for the main hall. This actually meant that we'd need to raise the roof by about 50cm. I love the little piano in the right hand top corner of the image. On the left is an Overhead Projector - we've moved on from that now - we have a computer and video projector.
The architect was really good - very helpful and thorough in his work.
So what went wrong? We got to the point where the plans had been submitted to, and accepted by the planning department. We were ready to begin... and something came to light. At the bottom of both images, right in the middle is the word "ascenseur" - lift. This was added in the last few weeks of the project's life when it was clarified by the planning department that, because the church was to be a public building, we had to add a lift for access to the first floor. This immediately added about 100,000 euros to the project and put us outside of what we considered to be a reasonable budget.
We had a meeting of the buildng committee in June 2004 where we discussed all this and decided that we didn't think that it was right to carry on with a project where over a quarter of the budget would be used on a lift.
Why didn't we think of that before? At that point we were still pretty new to the building game. It just got missed. We thought that it was optional when it turned out to be a legal requirement. Our mistake. However, we learnt an enourmous amount from that failed project, knowledge which we have applied to this project.
At that June meeting Stephen Trump, the previous pastor, passed on the baton for the building project to me. In Part 2 I'll take a look at how we moved things on from there.
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