Building RenovationCentral OhioColumbus

Griswold Center Kitchen Upgrade

The Griswold Center is the City of Worthington's senior center, and its warming kitchen — roughly 380 square feet — is where food and coffee for the building's programs are handled. The cabinetry, countertops, flooring and lighting were the ones the room had always had, and the rest of the center stays open while anything happens in it.

The city renovated the kitchen through a pre-bid EZIQC job order contract. All existing cabinetry was removed and replaced with solid maple face-frame cabinets — base, wall and 84-inch pantry units — with solid wood dovetail drawers, full-extension guides, and 46 doors and drawer fronts on bar pulls with bored locks and two keys each. About 77 square feet of solid-surface countertop with backsplash went in over them. Both sinks were replaced, a stainless double bowl and a stainless single bowl, with new faucets and new waste, vent and copper supply rough-in; the existing garbage disposal was disconnected and reconnected rather than replaced. The VCT floor came out along with its glue, a self-leveling underlayment went down, and new luxury vinyl plank and a four-inch cove base went over it. Walls and the drywall ceiling were painted, with drywall repair where cabinets and fixtures had been removed.

Nine four-foot lensed LED striplights replaced the old fixtures, and four eggcrate ceiling grilles on new galvanized ductwork restored return air the old lighting had been carrying. Because the building stayed occupied, the work was isolated behind temporary plastic partitions with a portable HEPA negative-air machine running during cabinet removal, drywall repair and painting.

Stainless prep table, range and hood in the Griswold Center kitchen

Technical Discussion

The return air nobody asked for

Nobody asks for return air. It was not in the request that started this project, which was for cabinets, countertops, a floor and better light in a 380-square-foot warming kitchen. It is in the scope because of what the lighting replacement was about to do.

The fixtures coming out were carrying the room's return air. Older lensed troffers are frequently installed as return-air light fixtures — the ceiling plenum pulls through the fixture body, and there is no separate grille in the room to show for it. Swap those for sealed LED striplights and the supply keeps arriving while the return path disappears. The room goes positive, doors get harder to close, cooking odor stops leaving, and the complaint arrives three months later as a comfort problem nobody connects back to a lighting job.

Corrected at this moment, the fix is about a hundred pounds of galvanized duct and elbows and four 24-inch eggcrate grilles set into a ceiling that is already open for the new fixtures and already scheduled for gypsum patching and paint. Corrected a year later, it is a separate mobilization into an occupied senior center, with its own dust containment, its own ceiling repair and its own paint — for exactly the same duct.

That is the general case worth taking from a small job. A cosmetic renovation is the cheapest hour a building will ever have for a mechanical correction, because the access, the protection and the finish repair are already being paid for by the finish work. It is also the renovation where such a correction is most often cut, precisely because it is not what anyone asked for and it does not show when the room is done.

The restraint elsewhere is what makes the case. This is a warming kitchen keeping its layout and its equipment, down to a garbage disposal that is disconnected and reconnected rather than replaced. One mechanical change, made because removing the lighting made it necessary, is the entire mechanical scope.

Our Work