Oops....We forgot something

     Still not to much to report as far as the building goes.  The dirt is still there,  a bit colder now that we had a dusting of snow.  We realized that we never put a map to show were the MPB site is on campus.  That could be helpful to some of you who are not as familiar with camp as those of us who live here. So here you go.

Our Campus Map

This is our map we give to guests and that we have up on the website.  As you are looking at the picture, the direction of  Lake Pleasant road (and the town of Hillsdale) is to the left.  To the right would be the town of Osseo and eventually 127. This map isn't really to scale.  But I hope you can get an idea of where the new building is going to be.  

    Our maintenance crew also finished running the water supply line last week.   We still haven't turned on the new well, but it's almost all ready to fire up.  Here's a picture of the location of the water supply going into the building.   

     The water supply line is the pipe sticking out of the ground.  Nothing too exciting, but come the begining of the new year we hope things will start to pick up.  

Diggin' Those Holes.

   We haven't done to much at the site of the new building but we have been doing quite a bit to bring water to the site.  There was the hole we dug in the last post that was used to connect our newest well to the water system.  That's all done and awaiting control boards to run the two different wells in Tandem.  For now,  it's just the same old well we've had for years running things.

   To get the water from the pump room, which is in the Chalet, we decided to use a line that supplies all of our staff housing on the west side of Campus that is already ran pretty close to the new building site.  Here's a picture of the tie in piont and the plumbing that will lead to the new MPB.

The grey pipes are the new plumbing for the MPB.  The pipes it ties into are under the dirt already but you can see the metal 'risers' that allow us to shut off the valves if we need to.  For orientation,  Jeff's house (the one in the previous pictures) is to the left through the pine trees.  

       From the valves we pass through the pine trees and into Jeff's yard.

We're looking straight at where the valves are, just past the pine trees.  

 From the valves we travel all the way through Jeff's yard and towards the MPB site.  Here's a picture of Jeff's yard.

This is Jeff's yard.  Sorry Jeff for the mess!  You can see the MPB building site in the distance.  You can also see a few of our maintenance crew cutting the road surface so we can cross the road with the pipes.  I think I remember the distance being 1500 ft of trench.  That's alot of pipe!


By the end of the day we hope to have the water supply runs in place.  I was also informed that the building structure will not be here untill January 3.  Until then, We'll be putting in foundations. 

Couple bread crumbs....

      Not to much 'new' information about the building.  The metal structure part of the building should be arriving pretty soon!  Dave,  our general contractor,  said it should be with in 2 weeks.  Maybe.    Before that our goal is to set the foundation in place so we can put up the building as soon as it arrives.  We're hoping, and praying,  we can avoid to many cold nights and snow before then.  

Looks like a bunch of dirt to me....

    To be honest they have actually been working on getting the site ready for a good month now.  That included taking out an entire hill  and leveling off alot of land.  Here are a few pictures of the finished 'footprint' of the building.  The lines on the pictures are just rough boundaries put on to give everybody an idea of where the building is going to set.  In person it's pretty obvious but the camera doesn't do such a great job picking up the details.  

This view is looking at the site from the paintball field.  The hill they took out starts at the two pine trees (you can still see the side of the remaining hill) and it came all the way towards where I was taking the picture.  

This picture is looking towards the site opposite from Hilltop Hall/Communiversity.  The hill on the left is the other side of the hill they took out.  Before they moved all the dirt you wouldn't be able to see hilltop, the house, or the truck because of the mounds of dirt that were there.  

This view is looking almost exactly opposite of the one above.  I'm standing right next to the bulldozer and the paintball field is to the right.



The next picture is kind of a fun picture.  We are installing a new well for the MPB and we had to dig out some existing water pipes to tie into.  While it's not even close to the site of the building this is where we have to tie into them,  Lakeside Chalet.  We're on the North side (closest to Pine Ridge) of the Chalet.  The white pipes at the bottom are probably 10-12 feet down.  It took our Maintenance crew about a day to dig this all out.  The Pipe we're going to be tapping into is the one at the bottom with the little jog in it.  Having a second, and larger,  well will give us about double the water pressure on the West side of the lake to accommodate the new building.   

Here are some Conceptual drawings and blueprint pictures to give you an idea of what this building will look like.  

 This is a conceptual drawing of what the building will look like. 

A couple of Elevation drawings.     

This is a top view looking down.  

So....Why are we building this thing?

   Welcome to the Blog about the building of our new Multipurpose building.  Here at Michindoh we have been blessed to have the problem of running out of space for out guest groups during the summer.  Some weeks during that time we can have upwards of 900 people on campus and most of them want to use our existing recreation center, usually all at one time.  The problem is that we just can't provide that amount of space for that many people.  We also have a few groups that use our gym area as their main meeting room.  It's Absolutely amazing to see those groups here because it's like having a rock concert for chapel but during those groups we don't have a gym for others to use.  The new MPB will, hopefully,  help us get around this problem.
     The other reason for the new building is our summer camp program.  Through the past 6 or 7 years we have been developing 'Harmony Springs'  which is now where our summer camp is housed all summer long.  We have 7 Tipis and 6 miners tents with a 'store front' in the middle.  Having Harmony Springs enables us to have our summer camp program (which had the highest attendance to date this summer) along side our guest groups.  In the past our programs would use the cabins which would take away our ability to house guest groups but with Harmony Springs we don't have that issue.  One of the problems with doing this , again,  is space.
      The past few summers our summer camp has not had a 'home' because of the need of our guest groups to have meeting rooms  we have had to move our program's meeting room in the middle of summer which can be a huge headache.  The new MPB will give our summer camp a home.  The new meeting room will be for our summer camp chapels and for eating as well.  This will  help keep our program out of the way of the guest groups and visa versa.
        Getting this new building is a blessing from God.  We hope to continue to be good stewards of what God has given us here at Michindoh.  We pray that the new building will enable us to further the kingdom of God through our conference services and our summer camp program.