Sorry to keep you waiting!

               It has been far to long since our last update!  For the most part,  the Dietzman Ministry Center (DMC)  is done!  About 3 weeks ago we had the dedication service.  Here are some pictures from that event.  

Above is Mr Dietzmen giving his address to the guests as well as a shot of the yummy buffet.  

Below is a picture of Our C.E.O., Jeff Knoll, enjoying the music being sung by Kris Healy,  our Director of Guest Relations.  This is the stage in our Multipurpose room.  

Dr. Ellis finished off the dedication by praying over the building and for those lives that will be effected by this new ministry tool.









Here are some pictures of the building signage.  There may even be a video tour coming soon!  

A week later we were blessed to have Cedar Creek Church use the Multipurpose room for the first time as a worship/session room.   Here are a few pictures of their set up.

This isn't any part of thier setup but the new 3D rock wall looked really good lit up by the lights.

Were'd the studs go?

      All the drywall is up and is in the last stages of mudding.  We're getting really close!   Here is a picture of the storage room for the large meeting room and the Gym.  This will give you an idea of what most of the Drywalled areas look like.  

We also have a large group of S.O.W.E.R.S here to help us finish up the project.  The S.O.W.E.RS a group of  volunteers who travel around the country in thier RV's and volunteer at camps and other places.  Michindoh wouldn't be what it is today with out the continued blessing that the S.O.W.E.R S ministry is to our ministry!    

One of those projects they are working on is the perment stage in the Large meeting room.  They've done most of this work in less then a week!

We have also, mostly, finished our new climbing wall!   We purchased this wall about 2 years ago from a school in the Jackson area.  It took a crew of about 8 guys a whole day to take down and it's been a side project for our crew for about a month.  When all is said and done it's around 25 ft. tall and it comes out from the wall a maximum of 6 ft.

We'll have a few updates next week as our crew finishes up the entry ways out side and the stage gets finished!  

Down to the Details........

    There are many small details that our work crew is putting together to get this building done.   We were very disappointed to find out that the building wouldn't be (completely) ready for any of our summer groups.  We are also very thankful that they all understood and helped us help them make thier time here a success!


  All of the stud walls are up and most of the electrical circuits have been ran.  We are now working on a few smaller projects as well as dry walling the hall, bathrooms, and small meeting room.

Here's a couple pictures of the dry walling progress.

  This is the mens bathroom.  You can tell because the set of pipes in the far corner are for the urinals. The door to the right is the entry door.

This is the women's bathroom as you come in from the hallway.  As you can see we're in the middle of mudding this room.  The stalls are on the opposite wall pictured here.

This is the rock wall that we are currently putting up.  We got this wall from a High school near Parma Michigan about 2 years ago.  It was a great blessing and it's nice to see it out of storage and getting set up.  This picture was taken on a scaffold about 30 ft in the air.  

This is one of the two Septic tanks we are having installed for the new gym.  Becker and Scrives is the local concrete company and they do some pretty excellent work!  

 Don't let the picture fool you,  this tank is quite large and very heavy.  So heavy, in fact, that they can only carry one at a time with thier truck.  This system will feed directly into our existing septic field that is in the background.  We also use it as our paintball course.

 

Time travel into the future!

    Things are really picking up here at Michindoh!  Unfortunately, for our readers,  that means we don't have as much time to blog about the new building.  Everybody involved has been making tremendous efforts to complete the MPB by the dead line.  

Pictures are worth a thousand words....  

 If you look in the back ground you can see the metal studs all framed in and ready to be covered up.  Our maintenance crew spent quite a few days stuffing insulation behind those studs to help with the heating/cooling bill.

 These two pictures are of some of our Lifeguard/specialist staff (we call them S.W.A.T.) helping out by coating each piece of paneling.  This took almost a whole week with close to 15 people to accomplish.  Good job Guys!   These planks will be going up on the walls (which you will see lower).  

This is Dave.  He's the Director of Maintenance.  What he's holding onto is the main power lines that come in the building from the transformer out side.  They had to use the backhoe and some rope to pull all those cables through only about 10 ft of conduit.

This is a view of one of the rooms with all the studs and the ceiling joists up.  This room will eventually house our Day camp program during the summer.

The next couple Pictures are of the crew that will be doing our cement floors.  In the back ground you can see the planks that were on the saw horses are now mostly all on the walls.  

After they cleaned up the floor and prepared it,  they started drawing in the lines for the basket ball courts and any other things we've asked them to put in.  

This is the big meeting room (Town Hall) and smack dab in the middle is the Michindoh Conference Center Logo.  We couldn't get to close because they were staining the floor when the picture was taken.  Pretty neat!

Let's build some walls!

The cinder blocks arrived this week and the mason's are hard at work starting on the two inner walls of the gym.  We've also mounted all the HVAC units to thier freshly poured cement pads.

Super post! We have so much to update.

The day you have been waiting for!   We are finally updating the blog!   

Alot has happened since our last post.  We have Electrical condiuits installed,  drains for all the plumbing and,  we have the floor poured!    

 Here are a few pictures of the electrical conduit in the ground.  The trenches that they are run in will eventually be our 'thickened slab' that our cinder block walls will rest on.

It's re-bar time!

Here is our crew preparing the inside of the gym for the floor.  By the end of this portion we will have gone through almost 3 tons of Re-bar.  That is alot of metal!  Anybody up for a really intense game of Hopscotch?  

Unfortunately,  we didn't get to many pictures of the crew pouring the first half of the floor because the light didn't arrive till after they were done!  Here's the first pour though.  The area that has the cement in this picture will be the Gym and Large meeting room side of the MPB.  There will be a 12 in cinder block wall that will cover those beams all the way to the roof.  

Here you can see where we snapped some chalk lines to make a guide to cut out the stress joints in the floor.  If we didn't this,  when the floor settles,  we could get an uncontrolled crack in the floor.  By cutting it into peices we allow the cement to flex if the ground were to settle.  

The on call guy for that weekend, Destry,  cut every single line with our cement saw.  

Here you can see the 2nd side prepped and ready for Cement.  The white tubes are the drains for the bathrooms.  The plumbers did all that work in 2 days!   

Here is the start of pour #2!  D.H. Roberts (the building contractor) was kind enough to offer his crew to help us pour the entire floor for this project for free.  They really know what they are doing!  

Here is the final gap to fill with cement.  It took the crew about 2 hours to pour the whole entire 2nd half.  

After they get done pouring and they 'boat float' the cement they let it cure for a little while.  Boat Floating is a way to get the cement close to the final level.  In the distance in the picture above you can see one of the Roberts crew using a power trowel to really smooth the cement out.  

It will end up like this after while.  Looks like Icing!  

That's all we have for updates tonight!  Hope you enjoyed it and we should be having alot more updates coming soon!   

Let's step back a moment....

Our last post had some pictures of the building up with Siding.  In this post we're going to explain how the crew puts that siding up.  

First,  they had to unload the insultion from the truck.  

A full semi trailer of bags of Insultion.  These roles will blanket the whole entire building when it's all done.

Here you can see their scaffolding and they are hanging the insulation first.  They have two little clamps that will clamp the top of the insulation to the top beam.  They then cut the access off at the top of the green siding.  There is a strip of sticky stuff on the top ledge of the green siding that the insulation will stick to.  Once they have the roll of insultion in place they will pull up a sheet of siding and drill in place.  They do this by drilling a small hole in the top of the siding, putting a rope through it, and then pulling it up.  Then each guy puts in a couple screws to hold the siding in place.

   This is the North West corner of the building or the corner farthest from the Paint ball field, closest to Bacon rd.

This is the framing of the East side entry way.  There is another one, that will be shown next,  on the south end of the building.   These are the main entrance to the building.  There will be more doors that the construction crew will cut in later in the process.  These were built before the siding went up because we will also be putting canopies up in front of them.  They also both have two windows on either side of the door.

  Here is our crew framing the South end canopy.  Both Canopies are the exact same.  They wont be enclosed on the sides,  just open.













You may have noticed in the pictures that the mud is pretty ridiculous around the work site.  With the thawing/freezing of the ground we've had some pretty messy days out there.   Here is a picture of the mud on one of the warm days.  

Thanks for reading!