The RFM new office is officially LEED Platinum! We have earned 91 points which is 11 points above the requirement for LEED Platinum.

Our Green Roof

Our new green roof garden is in, and it adds another sustainable element to our building.

There are two types of green roofs, intensive and extensive. Intensive roofs, which are thicker and can support a wider variety of plants are heavier and require more maintenance. Extensive roofs are covered in a light layer of vegetation and are less “intensive.”

The green roof system we have is the G3 Extensive Green Grid and is used for green roof projects that require a higher degree of aesthetic character. This system is composed of 18”x 24” trays, 4” deep and each tray holds 6 plants. Our garden has 108 trays that will cover 324 square feet and the vegetation consists of flowering varieties of sedums and chives.   The green roof garden is designed by Sirima Rajpreeja and was installed by Tim Ryan Construction.

Green roofs serve a few purposes for a building, such as absorbing rainwater, providing insulation, and helping to lower urban air temperatures and combat the heat island effect.

Other elements on our roof include a solar array, and five pairs of roof and overflow drains at the top of our rainwater collection system. Our roof is visible from the south facing window of the Norm Dicks Government Center.

What a Celebration!

Thank you to all of you who joined our opening celebrations last Friday. Enjoy a few photos...
(Photos by Kariba Photography, karibaphotography.com)

Join Us Tomorrow for Our Open House

Collaborate!

Another cool thing about our new space is the furniture it houses. We have seven bar-height collaboration tables we use for meeting, working, and gathering spaces all made here in Bremerton by Chris and Ryan Tincher. Chris is a general contractor and Ryan, a finish carpenter.

The tables are made from 2x2 ceiling furring salvaged from the building. The nail-hole discoloration comes from the furring strips having been nailed to the lath in their former life. Over years and a lot of moisture the discoloration adds to the history, texture, and beauty of the tables and, in turn, our space as a whole.

These collaboration tables, or boeufettes (buffets) as we like to call them, provide us a place to leave our desks and come together with fresh perspectives to an inviting space.

A Glimpse of Our New Space

Enjoy this glimpse of our new space, and plan to see it for yourself at our open house on Friday, June 24, from 3:00 - 6:00pm.
275 Fifth Street, Suite 100
Bremerton, Washington  98337

Solar Panels are Here!

Our solar panels arrived against a backdrop of dark clouds.  They saw rain before they saw any sun, but that will change.  Soon, this 9-kilowatt array will be hooked up to produce energy – just in time for summer.   According to our building’s energy model, this new array will generate about seven percent of our annual energy needs. 

We’re really pleased we could include energy production in our LEED® story – and that it could be done locally.  Our system is supplied and installed by Rick Lander of Washington Solar Incentives on nearby Bainbridge Island.  The polycrystalline panels themselves were produced by Silicon Energy in Marysville, about two hours north of here.  Rick and his team have done a great job. 

We look forward to monitoring our energy production and discovering how much money we’ll save on power.  And, we’ll recoup our investment in six years thanks to a federal rebate, initial depreciation, and an annual state grant.  We expect the array to perform nicely for up to 30 years. 

Now, bring on the sun.

We’re In!

We completed our big move over the holiday weekend. The printers and servers, rolls of drawings, and carpet samples are almost all in place. Our new office and studio provides untold opportunities for creative growth and already fosters a sense of community we lacked while separated into three spaces.  Yesterday, our first day in the new place, was filled with excitement and thankfulness.

Enjoy the photos…

The "Props" are in Place

How do you select interior finishes and furniture when you have thirty plus other design professionals looking over your shoulder? It’s not an easy task but one that I was quite excited to begin. As the interior designer on the project I knew that I had an amazing opportunity to not only create an environment that honored the history of the building, but also followed our guiding concept of the black box theater. When you think of a black box theater you think of simplicity and a space that is ever-changing. Color and texture is brought in through the use of props – the more I thought about this concept the more I knew that I had to be very strategic about how I used color in the office. We decided as a team that what was old would remain old but what was new would be those prop-like elements – bringing in pattern, texture and color into the interior environment.

It’s hard to put into words the feeling you have when you walk into the building today, now with all the “props” installed. Furniture arrived Friday and the red theater curtain also went up. Photos only offer a peak and the overall interior feeling of the space; you will have to come see and experience it for yourself. Join us on June 24 for our public open house from 3:00 to 6:00 pm at 275 Fifth Street, Bremerton, WA 98337.

Jennifer Paige, Associate

Interior Designer NCIDQ® Certificate No. 027363

Commissioning…who?

Our new office – what a dream!  New systems, new lighting, new flooring, new space…  With any construction project these days, building commissioning is just one of those things that happen in the process.  All of the new stuff needs to be tested.  It must work.

This building is a clean slate for each of us.  A fresh start.  It provides an opportunity for each of us who will work and interact in the building to stretch our minds in how things are done, just as the building design itself stretched the design team.  We’re calling this “occupant commissioning” – the chance for us to think about how we operate in all aspects of our work and life, so that we can continue to test our methods, improve on them, and challenge them again.

It is easy for us to think of some things:  we’ll be stewards of the environment through our new mechanical system and rain collection process.  And our partnership with community groups, like Holly Ridge Center, who will provide janitorial services through employment of those with differing abilities.  Our commissioning, though, pushes us to stretch our creativity further in how we can take the best next step.  An idea like teaming with Olympic College and Washington State University’s mechanical engineering program so that they can be active in the monitoring of our mechanical system, providing the students with a working laboratory of sorts, while we are able to realize regular observation of the unit – this is the type of thinking outside of the box that we recognize because our facility encourages it.  What other ways can we be more efficient, more sustainable, more creative or collaborative?  How can we better serve clients, our community, and ourselves?  In all of this, how can we make a broader impact?

Changing our mindset and getting each of us out of the routine of “the way we do” things is going to be the biggest challenge.  Many of us are anxious to tackle this task, and to do so quickly.  But, we’re dealing with change, so our solution is to start with small steps.  We’ve kicked off a series of seminars that focus on how things will be different in the new space.  We’re creating more opportunities to open up dialogue between each other.   And we’re really looking closely at the reasons why we do something in order to determine if and how it should be done.  More will come, and with all of it the change will happen.

Monica Blackwood, Principal
Director of Business Operations

Got Graffiti?

We did – and we still do.

Our building flanks one of Bremerton’s downtown alleys and graffiti is part of the alley scene.  Last summer, when demolition was going on inside, some kids found their way from the alley into our building.  Armed with a couple cans of fluorescent orange spray paint, they left some colorful messages across a concrete wall where our new kitchen was going to end up.  We thought about leaving the messages exposed where they were but, well, they weren’t all that complimentary.  So, instead, we photographed the nicer parts and turned them over to our design team. 

Jeremy Southerland and Jennifer Paige got together with our firm’s graphic designer, Shao-Lin Cheng, and she produced an 18’ tall graphic for our kitchen, and one for the studio. Shao-Lin’s graphic blends the inherited graffiti with several photos of the building as we found it – which was pretty raw itself.  The graphic yields an appropriate “back alley” feeling and offers a reminder of a piece of the building’s life prior to our renovation.

Beams into Boards

Our design called for the removal of a portion of the upper floor, to visually connect the two main working areas of the office.  Yesterday, the big upper floor beams came out, opening an 18’ x 25’ hole.  Now, the light is pouring down into the forum area, as we expected it would, and it looks great.  The 3x15 floor beams, all vintage 1948 Douglas Fir, were hauled off to a home sawmill in Indianola and sawn into 1x15 boards. We’re going to bring the boards back and use them to clad a 35’ long “feature wall” that runs from our main entry to the middle of the office.  It’s a nice way to take some beautiful old wood and reuse it in a totally different way.  The feature wall will hold a 30’ long graphic timeline of our firm’s 24-year history.

Less than Two More Months

We gathered in our new space this past Thursday! Amid freshly sheet-rocked walls and a newly poured floor, the partners announced firm promotions. Seeing the space almost complete was exciting and helped us to imagine working in the building in less than two months.

Got Lockers?

We have staff who like to run or walk at lunchtime, and we have staff who ride bicycles and row boats to work.  So, at the new building, we’re providing a pair of staff locker rooms, with showers, to make it more attractive and convenient for us to use alternate methods of transportation to and from work.  The cool part of the story is we’ve saved a load of workable lockers from the landfill in the process.  Bremerton School District allowed us access to the former Bremerton Junior High School, scheduled for demolition soon, and for a small fee we were able to pull student lockers from the hallways for reuse at our place. It’s another part to the story of preserving and recycling pieces of community heritage in our project downtown.  (And -- just think what’s been in those lockers?!!!!!!)

Got Stripes?

The nicer weather allowed the contractor to paint the building’s exterior.  We decided our paint scheme should highlight the simple nature of our inherited concrete box.  Finally, there is some exterior expression -- but still it only hints at the incredible amount of work that has taken place inside.  Those watching from City Hall across the street will have to go inside to appreciate the transformation this old retail building has undergone on its way to a new life as a professional office building. 

A Thoughtful Gift, and More Reuse

A Tim Ryan Construction crewmember, Nathan Stuart, built this table as a gift for Steve Rice. The table is made from reclaimed car decking from the old skybridge which used to connect our building to the long since gone Sears department store on 4th Street.

Thank you Nathan!

To see photos of the old skybridge, click here.

The Feature Wall

The crews have framed one of the more prominent pieces in the new office design – what we call The Feature Wall.  It’s a 30 foot long wall that acts as an organizing element, reaching from the front door past reception and into our central forum area.  The wall (unfinished in this photo) will be clad in 1x15 boards that we think are, well, special.  The boards will be sawn from a supply of huge 3x15 beams that now hold up a portion of the old building’s upper floor.  We’re removing some of those beams to make an open section in the upper floor, and this is one of the ways we’re planning to reuse them.  They should be real nice to look at, as they were cut from old growth Douglas Fir back in the 40’s.  The recessed slot in the feature wall will hold a graphic timeline of important events in the firm’s nearly 24-year history.

Spaghetti in the Floor

Our central forum is designed to be a flexible space for use by our firm, by visiting students, and for community events.  We expect to share a lot of information. So, connection points for power, video, and data transmission are spread throughout the forum, requiring plenty of conduit – just take a look at these pictures.  You might ask why the conduit stretches all over the floor, and that’s a good question.  The old floor slab, still visible, sloped in all directions to provide drainage for the days when our building was a Sears Auto Center.  Soon, our contractor will use rigid insulation to level everything out and cover the conduit, and then they’ll pour a new slab on top – this one will be flat!

Warmer and Brighter Everyday

Late last week and early this week, work has been going on that has made a great change in our project.  After months of seeing wood and metal framing inside the building, everything is turning white as a result of the insulation work, and right after it, sheetrock!  Now, the upper floor – to be our design studio – is noticeably warmer and much, much brighter.

This is the second and final step of the wall insulation.  The crews stapled a fiberglass fabric – called a bibb – across all the wall framing, then blew fiberglass wool into the cavities.  Now, combined with the initial layer of sprayed-on, closed-cell polyeurethane foam, the R-30 walls are keeping the building warm – even without a true heat source and with 35 degree temperatures outside.  The super-insulated shell is working already.

Enjoy these pictures of the studio, still retaining much of its warehouse character.  There’s so much great light bouncing around the space now that the sheetrock is going up.  We can’t wait to get up there!

Steven M. Rice, LEED AP®