JDL, along with a project team from Visnick & Caulfield and Vanderweil Engineering, completed an office fitout at 360 2nd Ave for our Confidential Robotics Client. JDL was tasked with restoring this existing warehouse into a beautiful new office that our client’s manufacturing team can work at daily. Building new offices, conference rooms, renovating existing bathrooms, as well as installing brand new electrostatic discharge flooring throughout the entire space for our client’s heavy machinery to be used throughout the day. High-end amenities included clear anodized demountable partitions throughout the space along with high end millwork and wood-slat decorative ceiling finishes. This office is located in a single-story building that will be used as a testing ground for manufacturing – the first production warehouse robot will be built at this location along with the current build of Spot Robots.

Unlike their headquarters at 200 Smith St, our Confidential Robotics Client wanted to turn this existing single-story warehouse at 360 2nd Ave into a profit center, a testing ground for their manufacturing team. Their first production warehouse robot will be built at this location and builds of their current Spot Robot will be shipping from this location as well.

The project team from JDL consisted of Mike Coakley, Matt Guldberg, and Mike Cocuzzo with help from Chris Ferragamo and Kyle Kiernan throughout the duration of the project. Our client’s team team had an aggressive schedule in mind (9 weeks from demo to substantial completion), and with the all the changes and additions they threw at us in the middle of the project, with COVID still in play, I believe JDL did an exceptional job completing this project and delivering a product the client’s team can enjoy.

We were originally tasked with completing the fitout which included revamping the existing electrical/IDF rooms, creating new offices, conference rooms, huddle rooms, and a new pantry. During the first week, Kyle mentioned the potential roof deflection that would occur since we were building headers and soffits from an 18’ deck down to 9’, and had demountable partitions installed below the metal framing. With this being a single-story warehouse, we were worried the snow load on the roof during the winter months would be too heavy and would create deflection that could eventually crush down on the DIRTT walls we were installing underneath. We were able to create ‘posts’ that consisted of heavy-gauge metal framing, wrapped in plywood, and then wrapped in clear-anodized break metal that would match the new DIRTT partitions.

Along with the fitout, our client asked us to renovate the existing men’s & women’s bathrooms and shower room during the middle of the project and asked if we could complete this before the rest of the fitout was completed. This was the first of many additions throughout their front & back of house; we were also asked to install new ESD flooring, added ductwork, supplemental cooling for their IT room, as well as added power/data/lights throughout their suite.

The most interesting detail throughout the space was the ceilings; we had (3) different types of ‘wood’ ceiling installed. In the corridor we used a decorative wood slat ceiling with a specific geometric pattern that took nearly a month to complete since each slat needed to be installed one at a time. In the open office area, we used a SoftGrid wood slat ceiling system that we’ve installed before on projects and in the café/pantry area we installed a SoftSound wood texture acoustical ceiling suspension system.

It took a lot of coordination and trades needed to work around one another constantly to get this project completed on time. This was the first project for a new client who we hope to get plenty of work from in the future. There was a lot of lessons learned throughout this project, but the result turned out a positive one.