We Have a Building Permit!

Our Mission recently moved to a two acre
plot of land that used to be a model house
display for "True Value" manufactured
homes that has basically gone out of business. You can see an arial view on our website's home page (click "more information" next to the thumbnail picture). The building you see here is in the upper left of the picture. The owner has rented us the land and 4 buildings for 3,500.00, less than what it would cost us to rent one piece of commercial space that would barely house our current Mission's needs. The land is two blocks off the freeway, fronts University Drive, main thoroughfare, and is one mile from Arizona State University. There is an unfinished mountain chalet that we are going to remodel as a Church building. (The land is a park-like setting with paths between the houses and a gazebo in the center that you can see.) We are currently holding services in one of the other houses in the living room. Once we move in here, the other three buildings will become offices, classrooms, and parish hall.

This is part of the interior that we are reframing
for the altar area. My helper Javier is putting up the header for the royal doors, to the left in the picture is one of the deacon's doors. The staircase he is standing on goes up to a loft that will eventually be removed to open up the area for the nave. To the far left where the windows are will be remodeled and become the narthex and the choir and chanter's area. (Editor's note: this eventually changed, but in later posts you will see how the building took on a "life of its own" and ended up far more beautiful than we imagined at this stage.)






Here we are bracing up the high A-framed ceiling in order to remove the weight bearing wall and put in new headers to hold up the up the building. This will allow us to remove the loft and the bedroom wall to open the entire area to become the nave.













This is the wall removed and new headers
installed. The loft will be removed after
we install the electrical, ductwork and
insulation in the ceiling areas above the
loft. We're doing 90% of the work with volunteers and on my "down days", which there have been a lot of lately with the economy. We have a budget of about 12,000.00 to do the remodelling, and we've managed to find a few really good deals on materials on Craig's list. One person whose electrical contracting business went bankrupt gave us almost all the electrical supplies we needed as a donation. If all goes well, we hope to hold Holy Week and Pascha services here instead of our living room.