Savings drive design behind Abbyland garage

The maintenance garage is designed to resemble a semitrailer truck with 300 feet of bay space representing the “trailer” and a two-story office embodying the “cab.” Rendering submitted by Excel Engineering Inc.

Crews from The Boson Co. work to complete an Abbyland Cos. maintenance garage in Curtiss. The 50,000-square-foot building will be viewable from a quarter-mile away along Highway 29. Photo submitted by The Boson Co.

Projects Specs Project Name: Abbyland maintenance garage Location: Curtiss Owner: Abbyland Cos. General Contractor: The Boson Co. Architect: Excel Engineering Project Cost: about $5 million Start Date: Feb. 1 Scheduled Completion: late September

Abbyland Cos. is spending pretty big dough to build a maintenance garage, but in the long run, the foods manufacturer will have a facility worth its salt.

The Abbotsford firm is spending about $5 million to construct a 50,000-square-foot garage along Highway 29 in Curtiss.

Pricy building materials used on the interior of the building include epoxy and urethane finishes, porcelain tile and burnished or ground-faced blocks that are more commonly found in food processing facilities than maintenance garages, said Joe Dolezal, project manager at The Boson Co., the general contractor for the building.

But the materials will save Abbyland money on building maintenance down the road, said Kurt Boson, vice president and co-owner of Marshfield-based Boson.

“It will probably be 20 to 25 years before a repaint is necessary,” Boson said.

“They really went the extra mile and looked at long-range maintenance factors.

The building is low- to no-maintenance.”

Abbyland is replacing a small maintenance facility with a much larger garage that can be seen from about a quarter mile away.

The new building will offer the company more capacity for truck maintenance, oil changes and washes for their own fleet as well as additional trucks. Eight maintenance truck bays, a wash bay and an underground lube pit are features of the structure.

Chris Guenther, designer on the project for Excel Engineering Inc., Fond du Lac, said the building is designed to resemble the shape of a truck with a trailer.

Three hundred feet of truck bay space create the “trailer” part of the building, he said, while the truck “cab” consists of a two-story, 12,000-square-foot office, complete with aluminum grill-work on the exterior.

The building’s heating system element was designed to save Abbyland money.

Waste oil from each of the maintenance building’s truck bays feeds the system.

An underground tank holds the excess oil and moves it to boilers, housed in an explosive-proof boiler room.

The process eliminates the need to find a disposal method for waste oil and also reduces the cost to heat the shop area’s floor.

“It’s a very automated system,” Dolezal said. “They use their own waste oil collected from remote sites and burn it in a three-boiler system.”

— Melissa Rigney Baxter