Late this afternoon, when I pulled up to our office project in Emerson, the first thing I did after getting out of my car was check the clock.
It was spot on, a good omen I decided.
In roughly 33 hours the building will play host to the Kick-Off Breakfast of the 2010 HoCo EDA CoRE Tour. Thursday morning brokers, bankers, architects, developers and an assortment of other interested parties from throughout the region will arrive for a breakfast meeting before departing on buses for a commercial real estate tour of Howard County
Of course I wish I could say we are ready. As recently as the end of August the 160,000 square foot building was scheduled to be completed on September 30th. When the opportunity arose to host a breakfast on October 29th I thought we’d be fine.
That’s the funny thing about construction schedules. They are often subject to things outside of your control like when a particular subcontractor fails to adhere to an agreed upon schedule. Sure, you could always replace the recalcitrant tradesman but that would only create further delay.
So with the caterer set to arrive on site tomorrow afternoon to begin setting up, today we filled the fountain, laid carpet and installed bathroom fixtures (wrong color but we’ll deal with that later). Outside the final corner of the 580 space parking lot was paved. It will be striped tomorrow if it doesn’t rain.
The elevator inspectors have been by twice. They’ll be back tomorrow. Our contingency plan is to hold the breakfast on the first floor.
Last Wednesday, when the clock above the main entrance was installed, it was off by at least an hour. On Friday it was still off by 45 minutes.
Today it was spot on. We’ve come a long way in 26 months. We’re going to be fine.
