Last week, the team got together upstate for a team day organized by Marica. Since we’ve fully moved to our office upstate, we’re trying to do more team get togethers. Some will be team days, others might be more informal site visit days. This time around, Marica organized a few focused activities for us on Thursday and a series of site visits for Friday.
We haven’t had a chance to get together since before the holidays, so we were all looking forward to seeing each other in person and spending a couple of days together. Those of us coming from further away stayed at our favorite local motel, Starlite, while others were able to come and go back home for the evening.
Site Visits
We met up on Thursday onsite at Undercliff. Amlin walked us through where we are in construction, what she’s looking forward to and all the things she’s been keeping in mind during sub-slab work.
Next, we headed to Gardiner Art Studio. This is a super fun small project that has its share of cool steel and window details that we were all eager to look at. We were also able to hear from Eric, the GC for the project about next steps.
Finally, we stopped by Woodland Pop House and Hemlock Hideaway, two renovation projects not far from one another. We admired the expansive views at Woodland Pop House and were able to meet Tyler, the GC for Hemlock Hideaway. Eleftheria gave us a great tour of Hemlock Hideaway, showcasing the creative and efficient reorganization of spaces in the existing home.
Team Brainstorming & Bonding
We spent most of the rest of our day at our new office. We’ve been working on reorganizing and rethinking our materials library. This is a physical library that contains lots of sample materials – from siding and flooring to tile and window finishes. We’re working on expanding our library as well as cataloging it to increase ease of use for everyone. We had a productive discussion about how to categorize materials, what display formats are most useful for us and for clients, and how we can find new materials to specify. We’re getting busy working on some backend organization and dreaming up new storage solutions…
While we were at the new office we also spent some time prototyping the dining room light fixtures out of PVC pipe and twine. The finished version will be made of brass, but we got a great sense of scale and spacing with the PVC. We’re super glad we tried it out before buying materials – the final fixtures will be much thinner!
The biggest excitement for the day involved one of our Valley MMag contributors, The Catskills Cocktail Club. Brendan stopped by to teach us all how to make a Gochujang Hills, the cocktail recipe featured in our recently published winter issue. We all had lots of fun trying our hand at measuring out and shaking our own cocktails. After our happy hour, we headed over to Mill & Main for dinner. We were lucky enough to interview two of the owners, Chris and Claudia for the winter feature in Valley MMag. We all really enjoyed our meals and our evening!
Site Visits…Round Two!
On Friday, Marica had scheduled another series of site visits. When all of us are upstate it’s a great chance to see our projects and learn from one another. We started by checking out Art Fort. Drywall is up and we are all in love with this super efficient home and art studio. The views from the living level provide a treehouse effect that we love! We can’t wait to see this project finish up construction later this year.
After Art Fort, we continued on to AA House – another home + art studio. It was fun to compare the two, since they have a few features in common. Electrical, plumbing and HVAC are all being installed and siding should go up in a few weeks!
Finally, we headed up to Saugerties to visit SkyHaus, Fermata and IRIE House. SkyHaus and Fermata are in the midst of rough-in. Eleftheria had a chance to check-in with the electricians at SkyHaus as they work through the final stages of rough-in work.
At Fermata, we checked out the recently framed window seats and the beginning stages of HVAC rough-in. We wrapped up our day at IRIE House, where Maxx has started framing while we wait for warmer weather to finish up concrete work. It was great seeing so many different projects in so many different phases of construction!
