New York City presents one of the most demanding construction environments to be found anywhere. From a high-cost labor market to limited space for staging, the city’s developers of multi-family housing and hotel projects are challenged to keep their projects on time and on budget, especially when it comes to apartments for rent as you want your landlord to try and make sure that any construction that needs doing to your home is completed as soon as possible. But this can be hard. Bathroom construction is a clear case in point.
“Historically, the number of trades and amount of coordination required in a bathroom exceeds pretty much any other area in a building,” said Les Bluestone, Partner of Blue Sea Development Company, LLC (Huntington, New York). “Anything that can reduce that bottleneck is helpful for completing a high-quality project on time and on budget.”
When Blue Sea Development accepted the challenge of building the Prospect Plaza public housing project in Brooklyn, Bluestone knew that streamlining bathroom construction would be crucial in the 394-unit project.
In addition to the difficulties of constructing high-quality bathrooms while keeping to a project schedule, Blue Sea Development faced another key challenge. To meet energy efficiency standards under several green building programs (Energy Star, National Green Building Standard and LEED) they needed to meet airtightness requirements between individual apartments and the exterior.
To streamline construction, while ensuring airtight, high-quality bathrooms, the development team chose SurePods™ pre-fabricated modular bathrooms. Instead of being built on site piece-by-piece, the bathroom pods were constructed in a controlled factory setting. After being trucked to the project site, a crane lifted each pre-fab pod into place. Crews then were able to connect each modular bathroom quickly and easily to the building’s power, water supply and wastewater systems.
“Prefabricated bathroom pods eliminate the scheduling and construction hassles of having multiple sub-contractors working in a constrained space,” said Bill Seery, director of business development for SurePods modular bathrooms. “You end up with a superior quality bathroom that’s completed faster so you can start renting or using your facility sooner.”
Commenting on the completed project, Bluestone added, “The bathrooms passed the airtightness requirement better than anything that could have been field constructed.”
The project, built on behalf of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and NYC Housing Preservation & Development (HPD), has won several green building awards and designations, including.
2016 National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Pillars of Industry Award for Best Green Building Concepts
LEED Platinum certification
National Green Building Standard (NGBS) Gold certification
Energy Star certification
SurePods is certificated as an off-site fabricator by the New York City Dept. of Buildings Office of Technical Certification and Research (OTCR).
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