Craftsmen deliver the finishing touches
From installing luxury floors in a 200-year-old building to creating a stone masterpiece beside a hospital’s emergency department, winners of the Craftsmanship Awards delivered exceptional finishes in challenging conditions.
The Visitation Hotel project transformed an 1824 Catholic girls’ school and former Civil War hospital into a boutique hotel in downtown Frederick.
Although the team from Carpet Fair Commercial Flooring knew that creating spectacular floors throughout the 139,500-square-foot building would be a big job, they couldn’t know how complicated it would be.
Workers discovered approximately 20,000 square feet of uneven subfloors, fragile joists and irregular structural supports, including “joist spacing that ranged anywhere from 12 to 28 inches” and joists that changed directions in parts of the building, said Ana Steinberg, Account Manager at Carpet Fair.
In those challenging conditions, the Carpet Fair crew had to perfectly install 22,500 square feet of broadloom carpet, 1,200 linear feet of custom runners on six refurbished staircases, and 3,200 square feet of specialty finishes on back-of-house concrete floors. They had to restore and feather in 12,500 square feet of hardwood floor. And they had to devise ways to install new, high-end, ceramic tile floors over historic hardwood.
“We had to work with an engineer on the tolerance for movement of the substrate so that there could be normal expansion and contraction of the hardwood but also a solid substrate for ceramic tile that could meet warranty requirements,” Steinberg said.
Tile was being installed at numerous locations around the building to create bathrooms for each hotel room. However, different areas of the building had very different substrate conditions.
“Every room became a bespoke solution,” she said. “We worked with multiple systems and multiple manufacturers to create additional substrates over historic hardwood, using cementitious substrates, various liquid membranes, moisture infiltration systems and tapes to create crack-suppression systems.”
The Carpet Fair team did more intensive coordination with framers and other subcontractors than on any previous project, Steinberg said. But that effort created “a fully modernized building with elegant finishes that created a beautiful feeling.”
The Mandy and Dennis Weinman Cancer Center Building at Sinai Hospital also required exceptional finish work but presented a very different range of challenges to craftspeople.
The team from Henry J. Knott Masonry was tasked with crafting a key architectural feature – a 3,500-square-foot expanse of Jerusalem stone that would bring natural beauty to the façade and entrance.
The stone, however, had to be installed across multiple elevations, each presenting challenges.
The southwest elevation included an exterior stairway and the stonework would have to follow the pitch of the stairs. On that side of the building, masons would also have to work right up against the drive lane to the hospital’s Emergency Department (ED).
Maneuvering the telescopic forklift around the work area and through the ED lane without impacting the flow of ambulances and hospital personnel required traffic control and a skilled lift operator to get materials to the scaffolding.
The north elevation included a radius retaining wall so masons would have to segment stone blocks to create that radius.
The Henry J. Knott team leveraged their combined 80 years of masonry experience to overcome each challenge and deliver an exquisite stone installation.
Through planning, careful cutting and fitting, they ensured the design pattern was executed proportionally on each course. And when a potentially catastrophic four-inch bust occurred through the width of an entire wall, they developed a new joint layout that resolved the problem and procured replacement stone without delaying the project.
