We made good progress over the past few days, ending the week with a committed date for groundbreaking. This is something we have been working on for a long time. Originally we thought we could break ground the third week of December, then it was the second week of January, but we now have a firm date of Jan. 22, which is more than a month beyond what we originally thought!
We have scheduled a formal groundbreaking ceremony at 1 p.m. on that date. We originally planned to have the ceremony first thing on Monday and then get out of the way of the heavy equipment, but the weather is forecast to be in the 30s on Monday morning, warming to the 50s by the afternoon. After giving it some thought, we decided to schedule it for when it would be warmer. You know us Texans—we can’t handle cold weather!
We are inviting the office staff and the FI students to attend the groundbreaking. Our builder, Highland Builders, and the architect, Alliance Architects, will both have representatives at the ceremony. We expect there will be 40 to 50 people present. We plan to record the ceremony and have it available for next week’s update. I will also be showing some excerpts from the ceremony on next week’s In Accord.
With the groundbreaking scheduled for next week, we decided to get some video of the property before any construction begins. This will make it possible for us to have a before and after look. In order to get this footage, we needed to act right away. So, on Thursday of this week, Clyde Kilough, William Beech, Britton Taylor and I recorded an on-site video tour of the property, showing how it appears before any construction has taken place. I believe you will find this an interesting presentation of the four of us, standing on the location of the building and narrating a description of the area. To add to the presentation, we used our new drone to capture some footage from the sky. We are posting some of this video along with this week’s building update. More will be coming next week, so stay tuned! We should have pictures of actual construction next week!