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Tolles Career & Technical Center Cosmology Renovation

Cosmetology is a licensure program. Students at Tolles Career & Technical Center in Plain City log hours at real stations on real clients, which makes the lab less a classroom than a small salon operating inside a school building. The suite it occupied — 4,878 square feet across a classroom, an IT room, the lab, a pedicure area and a facial area — had been laid out for an earlier version of the program.

The renovation reorganized the suite and rebuilt it from the slab up, with Prodigy providing the architectural and engineering design and permitting on a pre-bid Ohio Purchasing Council contract. Walls came down where the new plan required, the concrete floor was repaired in their footprints, and doors were returned to the district. Carpet and tile gave way to 20-mil wear-layer vinyl plank. Ceiling grid and pads were replaced in the classroom, IT room and lab, with the pads in the pedicure and facial rooms replaced to match. Troffers became LED backlit panels with occupancy controls and dimmers, walls and existing frames were painted, and the PA and intercom moved into the new ceiling.

What the room is for is its station count: casework for 51 cut stations, each with a mirror, and nine manicure stations with built-in drawers, plus 51 cut-station chairs and 18 manicure chairs. Existing circuits stay where cut stations stay, and the new layout gets a minimum of one circuit per cut station. Six hair-washing stations and two washers and dryers were plumbed new, the appliances installed, and the hair interceptor serving the suite replaced. A new exhaust fan serves the expanded area and reports its status back to the building's existing control system.

Cosmetology lab with styling stations, mirrors and shampoo bowls at Tolles

Manicure counters and stools in the Tolles cosmetology lab

Esthetics workstations and dispensary cabinetry at Tolles

Row of styling stations down the renovated Tolles salon floor

Reception seating and storage at the Tolles cosmetology program

Mirrored styling wall and chairs in the Tolles cosmetology lab

Technical Discussion

What a cosmetology lab does to the floor

Most classroom renovations are surface work. Walls move, finishes change, the slab is never touched, and the schedule is set by how fast trades can follow each other through a room. A cosmetology lab does not work that way, and the reason is under the concrete.

Six hair-washing stations, two washers and two dryers each need supply, waste and vent, and the existing suite had none of that where the new plan puts them. So the floor gets trenched, the lines are run to the receptacles, and the concrete is replaced. That is the item that makes this a renovation rather than a refresh: it sets the schedule, every finish after it waits on it, and it is the one decision that cannot be revisited cheaply.

The hair interceptor proves the point. Wash stations feed hair and product into a waste line that tolerates neither, and the interceptor is what keeps that out of the building's sanitary system. It is a maintenance item with a service life, and replacing it while the floor is already open costs a fraction of reaching it later. A district that skips it here does not get another chance until something backs up.

This is also why the layout has to be settled before the plumbing is, in the order that feels backwards. The 51 cut stations and nine manicure stations are casework — they can be rearranged over a summer. The six wash stations, the laundry pair and the interceptor are cast into the floor. Locate the wet work first; arrange the dry stations around it.

Electrical takes the opposite approach for the same reason. Circuits are reused wherever a cut station stays put, and the new positions get a minimum of one circuit per station, because dryers and irons running at once is what trips a shared circuit in a working salon. The nine manicure stations are deliberately unpowered — worth confirming against how the program teaches, since adding power to that casework later means opening a finished floor again.

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