Creative Constructors watches a Sunset rise

A warm January helps Creative Constructors make up for lost time on the masonry portion of the job. Photos courtesy of Creative Constructors LLC

January was good to Creative Constructors.

The arctic temperatures and heavy snowfalls of December gave way to spring thaws as the calendar turned to 2006. Was it global warming? Was it just a climate quirk?

Why it was happening didn’t matter much to the general contractor. What it meant for the construction team’s work on Sunset Retail in Waukesha was more important.

When Creative Constructors signed on to construct the 14,000-square-foot, single-story retail building on Sunset Drive, it expected to start the job in June and get it buttoned up before the cold weather hit.

That didn’t happen, said Brian LaBonte, vice president of Creative Constructors. The owner needed to confirm the project’s feasibility, and the city needed assurances that traffic from Sunset Retail wouldn’t get backed up on Sunset Drive.

“We re-engineered it to help push it along through the city,” LaBonte said. “But we were awarded the project in September.”

So rather than a comfortable summer start for the project’s masonry work, Creative Constructors instead got started in November. November was cold. December was worse.

“We only worked on it for about three or four days in December,” LaBonte said.

A Creative Constructors crew installs masonry on the Sunset Retail project in Waukesha. Photos courtesy of Creative Constructors LLC

With a project budget that didn’t include funding for winter construction, the team was forced to watch weather forecasts with fingers crossed.

“Because of the good weather in January, we were able to get it done,” LaBonte said. “We’re very grateful.”

But before Creative Constructors even got to the point of worrying about weather, it had to get the land ready for construction. That required asbestos-abatement work prior to demolishing three buildings, including an old Burger King that was abandoned about 10 years ago.

“Then we brought the site up to grade and leveled it,” LaBonte said. “Then we ran into the normal problems of soil conditions. We took care of that while we were doing the foundation work.

“Then, we hit a cold spot.”

But with the cold-weather work behind it, the construction team can turn its attention to curtain-wall framing and mechanical rough-ins in preparation for the seven or eight tenants that will one day operate out of the new structure.

And, LaBonte said, the project is still on track for its original completion target in June.

“For the rocky start, it’s actually going well, and we’re looking forward to finishing the project up,” he said. — Chris Thompson