Renovations Continue at Tenino City Hall

Building: Crews Working to Salvage Hardwood Floor Uncovered During Construction to Repair and Restore Historic Building

Posted

If you take the stairs up to the city council chambers in Tenino City Hall, you’ll be able to see a piece of the century-old building’s history: hardwood floors, recently uncovered beneath old carpet and asbestos-ridden tile.

“When you dig into an old building, you’ve got a hundred years of layers and sometimes you’re pulling out like three or four false ceilings,” Tenino Mayor Wayne Fournier said. “With the floor, we didn’t know what to expect.”

They’re going to try and salvage the hardwood floors, Fournier said, “and actually it might turn out really nice.”

The demolition and restoration work currently going on in the city council chambers is part of a comprehensive building-wide renovation project to make some much-needed structural repairs and keep the historic building usable.

Originally built across the street from the Hercules Quarry in the 1900s, the sandstone building was moved brick-by-brick to its current location on the corner of Sussex and Hodgden streets in 1922. The building was renovated in the 1980s when the library moved out and the top floor became the city council chambers, but aside from that, Fournier said, “it’s kind of sat how it is for the last 40 years.”

An attempt to repair the damaged roof back in November 2018 was stopped when construction workers found extensive structural damage, and soon after, the Tenino City Council authorized an engineering firm to take inventory of the building and come up with an estimated dollar amount for repairs.

“It’s an old building so there are a lot of things that have to be maintained. And it’s an old stone building so it’s also kind of unique in its maintenance,” said Fournier. “We’ve had issues with water penetration through the stone. We discovered that … unknown to us, the roof had collapsed like seven inches at one point and it was actually failing.”

In 2019, the state Legislature approved a $515,000 line item for the Tenino City Hall renovation and restoration project in the state’s capital budget.



So far, the roof has been fully repaired and construction crews are working on the interior of the city council chambers, but the project’s timeline has suffered greatly due to COVID-19, Fournier said, along with the unexpected discovery of asbestos in the tiling and a stark increase in the cost of building materials since the project began.

“It’s tough. It’s tough building anything right now,” said Fournier.

The city was able to do the bulk of planning for the project during the early months of the pandemic and crews were able to start some of the demolition work late last year, Fournier said, but making any significant progress on the renovation has been difficult.

“COVID, it really did put a damper on a lot of things, and it kind of shifted focus for everybody, but we’re going to keep on keeping on,” said Fournier, who later added: “It’s hard to work on long term projects when you’re only able to face the immediate crisis.”

The city is pushing construction crews to work quickly, Fournier said, but there’s no timeline for when construction will be complete.

But Fournier said he is excited to see the interior of the city council chambers when construction is finished, adding that the finishing touches, such as false support beams in the ceiling and the hopefully-salvaged hardwood floors, should be more appropriate for the historic building than the chamber’s “kind of gaudy” aesthetic before the renovation.

“It’ll be cool to see what we can come up with,” he said.