The Big Sandy School gym received a facelift this summer, which has resulted in a longer closure of the facility to students and the public. During the lockdowns of last spring and summer, school administrators were inundated with questions about when the gym would be reopening. This week, I found out that though there is not a start date for the public using the facility again, the time closed has been used well. The floors in both the main gym and the annex have been redone entirely and some equipment changes have taken place in the annex gym.
The story started with an insurance adjuster examining a ten by twelve foot section of the floor near the football field entrance door. The boards there were in need of replacement. The insurance adjuster looking at the floor determined that simply replacing the section and repainting the floor would not restore the court to its proper condition. Kelly Haaland, the school superintendent explained that the agent determined it would be impossible to repaint the floor to match, which meant that the entire court needed to be refinished. "It comes about every 8 or 10 years. They sand it down to the bare wood and then start from scratch again."
Kelly pointed out the section of the floor that was replaced, he said, "When we replaced the boards in this section over here, for whatever reason, maybe climatizing, there's just a small gap. You can see there's some, not big, but some spreading just about the size of a pin width. Not major, but what he wanted to do was go in with some oil to fill that divot." The use of the oil base resulted in a much longer curing time than would be normal for refinishing a court floor. "This is the main reason we wanted to keep it shut because Steve Lalum from High Performance Flooring in Lewiston said the longer you keep people off of it, the stronger that finish is going to be. That is the purpose of keeping it shut. And since he's the expert, we're going with his recommendation to keep it shut down.
Steve Lalum's company, High Performance Flooring, has done quite a few floors in the area. "He's done Rudyard and Fort Benton. He's doing Lewiston right now. Major projects like this take time. He did an awesome job." The local business did a beautiful job of refinishing the Big Sandy Court as well.
"The sanding, refinishing, stenciling, everything all total project was approximately $65,000. Thats why we get just a little punchy when we see abuse of the floor. We are pretty strict on that."
The current gym floor was installed in the early 80s.
The annex gym, which hosts various sports practices, as well as the school weight room also had a new floor installed this summer. Anyone who visited the facility in the past few years recognized that this project was much needed. However, the completion of the installation has brought its own challenges: "The big push in here with the new flooring is that you have to put a sealer on it. Of course with everything going on the world, they were able to put on one coat. We needed two more coats and the sealer was on back order." With the first layer of sealer down, they are able to clean and maintain the replacement flooring, but the floor isn't totally ready for use until the backordered sealer arrives. While the school waits on the remaining sealer to be available, they've made the decision to limit traffic in the area as much as possible. The school sports teams will be using the gym to prepare for their upcoming seasons.
In addition to the replacement flooring, other equipment changes have taken place. One noticeable replacement involves the squat rack, which has been replaced with a fancynew one. The number of exercise bikes has been cut to a more manageable number, and most of the cardio equipment has been moved from the smaller annex room, which now serves as a lunchroom. Regarding the gym being made available to the public again, they're not sure of a date just yet, as issues related to flooring, cleaning, and staffing create ongoing challenges to the public's use of the space. "If you want to come and work out in the future, I'm not giving a date on that yet. How we're going to do it, how we're going to clean it, we don't have enough personnel right now. We may run the whole thing through adult ed and have someone posted down here to make sure people follow the rules, then we'll be good to go."
