By Selwyn Harris

Progress is moving along at a steady pace on the remodeling project at Pahrump Valley High School PVHS .

Nye County School District NCSD Project Manager Dave Wonderly said despite a few setbacks everything looks to be ready not long after the new school year begins.

“We plan on moving in sometime this fall. As far as the drywall and all of the work on the inside, the major reconstruction is done. We are into the finishing work at this time. painting inside and out is ongoing. Mostly what we have left is a lot of site work. The practice football field, landscaping and the infrastructure,” he said.

Wonderly said that at the outset of the project, it was thought that the job would be completed earlier than the current target date.

“We thought at one time that it could be possible, but due to the fact that our scope of work has changed slightly and it has increased, we merged phase II and III. Phase III was essentially the practice football field so there was no reason we couldn’t do that concurrently. However, we have added the remodeling of the auditorium and that was a late change, which basically resulted in finishing on time,” he said.

Last December students and faculty moved from the original building to the new addition.

Wonderly noted that they will return soon to the remodeled facility in what he referred to as a “soft move.”

“The people will be coming out of the new building and into the renovated portion, which is roughly 17 classrooms. Administrative personnel and some counselors,” he said.

As far the exterior of the building, Wonderly said there were some initial issues concerning the tennis courts at the campus.

“At one point in time, it was considered to defer them, but later a decision was made to go ahead and continue. Another good thing that has happened just recently is we struck a deal with the cooperation of Wulfenstein Construction to pave in between the baseball and softball fields, which will basically complete that whole area and tie it all together,” he said.

The school’s heating and cooling systems presented another challenge for the project.

Wonderly said crews came up with a plan B when the project encountered a slight wrinkle.

“Originally, we were only going to change out the heat pumps over areas of renovation; however, with the new ground source heat pump, which is what feeds the actual heat pumps in the building, we decided due to the age of the existing heat pumps we changed them all out and it was a considerable size change order,” he said.

In terms of compatibility, Wonderly noted that there were some issues connecting systems from the new addition to the renovated building.

“What we found out is that a lot of the existing systems were not compatible with the new. Most of those systems were low voltage systems, which has to do with the quick advancement of electronics. Some of the systems like the fire, the intercoms, and security systems that we had hoped to integrate into the new, we basically found out that there was no retrofitting, it was more or less a replacement to keep things up to current standards,” he said.

In October 2010, trustees awarded a $26.3 million contract to Core Construction Services of Nevada to build the addition.

Core Construction was the lowest of 14 bidders without any irregularities, in bids that ranged from $25.89 million to $28.85 million.

Another project is taking place up north at Tonopah Elementary/Middle School.

On Tuesday, the Nye County Board of Trustees voted unanimously to get the project going.

Wonderly said once underway, it will be a two-phase project.

“The first phase is relatively small. We signed the guaranteed maximum price contract of $660,000. On Tuesday, the board signed it and approved it. It’s the school’s gym modernization and the first phase is to redo the girls’ and boys’ locker rooms, and replace the boiler,” he said.

NCSD Transportation/Maintenance and Operations Supervisor Cameron McRae noted that the Tonopah project had to be delayed at one time due to the economic conditions in Nye County.

“The board of trustees had directed me to move forward with moving the renovation in phases first based upon our available funding,” he said.