construction – Page 9 – Building The Godfrey

Fun In The Sun #sitevisitfriday

The sun was out for our #sitevisitfriday tour, we noticed some cool things taking place and want to share then with you. The back side of the lower section of the hotel skin is up and complete. Stay tuned for more outside skin being applied soon!

After the skin was complete a little testing took place, in the video you can see water testing on the seams for leaks.

As if we were in London and you hear “Mind The Gap”. On the construction site with the core drilling and holes being make it is “Mind The Holes”. The team does a great job letting us know where there are holes.

A great future guest room floor corridor.

Graciously sized guest rooms. It expands to the right where you cannot see at the moment.

The old construction site sat for a long time so we needed to remove all the old fire proofing on the building and apply new. Remember, safety is key.

From all that core drilling, the valves for the plumbing are waiting patiently to be installed in each room.

Have a great weekend and thanks for reading!

Drill Baby Drill

The end of the week, Friday, we meet again and that means we walk the hotel construction site for #sitevisitfriday. I wanted to take you back in the construction phase and explain a big factor in our build. As you know the original construction of the building was years and years ago, we decided to make upgrades to the building to meet the needs of the hotel. Step one to start those upgrades was to level every floor by pouring a new concrete floor. Step two to this phase was then to core every floor for plumbing, electrical, etc… which is what we saw taking place today. This process has been completed on lower floors and they are now moving up floor by floor.

Before and After Of Concrete Pouring

This process was very labor intensive and took some time to complete. You probably saw truck after truck coming to the construction site for a few weeks earlier this year.

The team then took the concrete wheel borrow by wheel borrow up to each floor as a team poured it and leveled each floor.

After each floor dried and settled over a period of time the coring began for all the piping to be placed in the hotel. These are heavy powerful drills with incredible drill bits to cut these holes in the concrete. The drill bits for coring ranged in size from 6 inches to over 1 foot.

Here is the result from the drilling, these are called the cores.

The end result with plumbing installed.

Now to do this for each of our 221 guest rooms in the hotel, so now it is time to drill baby drill.

The Exterior. Up She Goes.

Well it is Friday and we wanted to show you the exterior. Cold, wind, snow, rain, it doesn’t stop LendLease our construction company from moving forward. When we had some beautiful sun the past couple days before this last snow storm, the new exterior skin was being applied to the building. This is a very difficult project as the entire outside is placed on the building like a puzzle. We are excited to see it go up over the next several weeks and give the building that distinct architectural look it was meant to have.

The entire process of building a hotel and brand is sectioned out into phases. Each phase has its scope of work and what is to be completed and when. It may seem like you are jumping around but in the big picture these phases are all related to each other and have to be completed in order.

What Is #SiteVisitFriday

The Godfrey Hotel team walks the construction site every week to keep an eye on the progress and to see what has been going on. Every week when we walk the floor we discuss the layout and the vision of what the hotel will look like.

In the photo George Jordan our Area General Manager and Jermaine Anderson our Hotel Manager stand the 4th floor Rooftop talking about the layout and scenery of the skyline. We cannot wait for you to see what we have in store for this space.

The Building

Here she is, well a very early version of her, right in the heart of the River North Neighborhood in Chicago. Our building was originally built as different hotel but the company that was behind the project, well lets just say it didn’t end well for them, didn’t finish it. This is where several years later our company came in, purchased the property and decided to build the Godfrey Hotel Chicago.

The building in a very early construction phase showing the framing.

Working during the colder months, the building remains wrapped as you can see from the corner of Huron at LaSalle.