Above: From left, volunteers Michael Kutch, Jacob Green and Erik Walker rip up the floor in the Red Rock Center for the Arts in Fairmont on Saturday afternoon. The 123-year-old flooring will soon be replaced.
FAIRMONT — The history of an old building should be cherished and its preservation kept at the forefront. But keeping up with the maintenance to ensure its future also needs to be considered.
Sonja Fortune, executive director of the Red Rock Center for the Arts in Fairmont, knows this all too well.
“It has been on our agenda for several years to replace the floor on the upper level. It has reached its end-of-life stage and it cannot be sanded down and re-finished any further,” Fortune said.
Fortune said the floor is soft in some places and also splintering. She said the 123-year-old flooring, made of natural pine fir and installed in 1898, has been re-sanded six times.
“We approached a couple of different companies. We looked at replacing it with real, solid wood and also with lament floor,” Fortune said.
Ultimately it was decided to replace it with a natural, solid red oak flooring, which will look similar to what they currently have.
Because the Red Rock is on the National Register of Historic Places, the outside structure of the building cannot be changed, but improvements can be made on the inside. Fortune said luckily the structure of the building is sound, but the flooring needed to be addressed.
“It was important to us to to preserve the integrity of the historical significance, but also to ensure a future for our organization,” she said.
Fortune said they plan to save some of the original flooring and will make pieces of it to display within the Red Rock.
“The good thing is we started seeking bids prior to Covid and we signed a contract before Covid. That was a very fortunate thing for us because the price of wood has gone up a lot, so we saved ourselves a lot of money,” she said.
During the weekend, volunteers ripped out the old flooring. Fortune said they were originally worried about finding enough volunteers for the project.
“The Red Rock was restored by a great group of volunteers back in 1998. Most of them are older now and can no longer do that work but we’re blessed to have a younger group of volunteers to tear out the floor,” she said.
She especially thanked board member Michael Kutch for coordinating the project.
Fortune said next Hertzke Construction will come in to check and make sure that it’s structurally sound under the flooring. Then a company will come in to install the new floor in October.
The cost of the project is just under $40,000. Fortune said the money is coming out of a building improvement fund, a lot of which comes from the interest in the dividends from the endowment fund.
“We are also accepting donations and appreciate the generosity of the community to help keep the building in good repair,” Fortune said.
Because the Red Rock is a non-profit, any donations are tax-deductible.
Fortune said they received $1,000 from Martin County Area Foundation to move forward with the project.
Unfortunately the Red Rock will have to shut down for about a month while the floors are replaced. However, Fortune said she feels it’s worth it due to the money that they’ve saved.
After the flooring project is done, Fortune said they plan to re-open Nov. 1.
“During Covid we actually turned our lower level space into an art room. We’re going pretty strong with art education,” Fortune said.
She said they’ll be doing some art education throughout October and that the office will be open on limited hours during the next few weeks.
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September 20, 2021 at 01:00PM
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