During a water break, fitness instructor Paige Denison had to tell her exercise class about her last 10K race. Looking pointedly at one student, she described how someone flew past her at the end of the race. “Annie’s great-granddaughter skunked me!” she announced.
How old was she, the class wanted to know. Annie said she was 14. Her fellow exercisers were impressed, but not quite enough to rib their teacher about it, until Denison admitted “Not that it doesn’t happen, I’m just not used to it being one of your great-grandchildren!”
Everyone grinned, and then went back to work, building abdominal muscles and getting hearts pumping.
This was the Sno-Valley Senior Center’s EnhanceFitness class, a nationwide program based on Surgeon General recommendations for preventing falls, and one of the center’s offerings that the board of directors has committed to maintaining through an upcoming remodel.
“We would like to preserve as many programs as possible during our renovation, but our three primary concerns are our EnhanceFitness classes…our lunch program, we have many frail seniors that this is their only hot meal of the day… and then the adult day health program,” said Board President Kathy Wheeler. “Those are our core programs, and then we will keep anything else we can get space for, book club, painting groups,” and so on.
Construction will add much-needed program space, second-story restrooms and storage, and improve the overall usability and safety of the 1926 building, but at a cost.
“When we do that, we’ll be putting in a new fire suppression system,” Wheeler said. “Every area of the senior center will be included in that system.”
So every area of the senior center will have to be vacated during the work, for roughly four to six months.
Of course, the center has no intention of shutting down during that time. The board of directors is working to negotiate a lease with a Valley facility for relocating the center’s priority programs, “and anything else we can get space for,” Wheeler said. They hoped to keep most, if not all of the programs available in a single location.
“We are totally dedicated to staying right here in the Valley,” Wheeler added.
Other costs of the project are historical and financial. The addition of second-floor program rooms will close off the dining room area, known in the 70s as Goliath’s Pit, for the huge pipe organ installed there. Center quilters will lose their prime display space, the balcony railing on the open second floor, but the center has already made plans for displaying the quilts as beautiful and functional room dividers and sound barriers, Wheeler said.
Four stout support beams extending from the dining room floor to the ceiling, will stay.
“We’ll have to work around them,” Wheeler said.
Financially, the project will not cost the center itself. In 2010, the center received a federal Community Development Block Grant for $330,000 to add the program space. This year, the center was notified that it has been awarded another $280,000 to complete the second-story work—restrooms and storage, but that money has not arrived in King County coffers yet. The county is administrator of the CDBG grants.
Since the two grants are logically tied together, King County has extended the center’s deadline for spending the initial, or Phase 1, grant. The extension will allow the center to have all the work done simultaneously, once the Phase 2 grant money becomes available.
Wheeler said they’ve already contracted with architects Arai, Jackson, Ellison and Murakami (www.araijackson.com) for the designs. “We have our bid documents ready…. and as soon as the money hits the county, as soon as those funds are available to us, we are ready to go.”
Updates on the project will be announced in the center newsletter, and on its website, www.snovalleysenior.org.
