Construction Underway at Our New Architectural Office

Construction progress on our Architectural Office below. We’re a little over halfway complete and hope to open in our new location in the NOTO Arts & Entertainment District in Topeka, Kansas in early August! We’re finishing out a really rough shell space. I mean rough. It was a former alley with NO utilities, bathrooms, hvac, electrical, working doors, or dry roof. We’ve replaced the roof and repaired the roof structure, replaced the floor slab, added underslab utilities, stabilized the settling existing walls, added footings at the front and rear, added 7” of spray foam insulation in the ceiling with intumescent paint finish and newly framed offices, restrooms and workroom. In the coming weeks we’ll have electrical and lighting completed, a new HVAC system with exposed ducts, working plumbing, new storefront entry systems, signage, painted historic brick walls, and polished concrete floors. We’re excited to have a new space to work out of and help our newish company continue it’s growth.

One of the first steps was lining the walls with plastic to protect the closed cell spray foam insulation. The insulation was installed 7” thick between the rafters and is being painted black with an intumescent fire rated coating. We are leaving the insulation exposed in the ceiling (normally people do not expose this product), so the insulation had to be cleaner and more carefully applied than normal.

Mockup of the end result of the insulation (fuzzy image). The insulation ended up being a little wavier than we’d hoped but once painted black, we’re confident it will look pretty good exposed in the space.

Spray foam installers used a planer tool to smooth out the “warts” on the insulation and prepare it for paint.