December 11, 2007
By GUNNAR OLSON
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
The snow starting to fall Thursday morning threatened to slow traffic but not the construction at Prairie Trail in Ankeny.
The builders of the first houses of the 1,031-acre development have an important deadline – the June home show of the Home Builders Association of Greater Des Moines.
“These guys don’t like working in (the cold), but they do,” said Ted Rapp, the project manager with the lead developer, DRA properties of Ankeny. “The people here are going full-bore.”
In the past weeks drivers passing by on Southwest State Street have watched the development’s first house, on the corner of new Southwest 18th Street, grow out of the ground, even as summer’s mud turned to winter’s frozen, wrinkled crust.
A few inches of snow on the ground would help the winter construction, Rapp said, because it would insulate the ground and slow it from freezing more.
The work trucks and laborers in Carhartt overalls won’t be ready for the home show until there are at least 15 homes in a section called Precedence at Prairie Trail, as well as a new, 3-acre city park at the neighborhood’s center.
There are basements to be poured, walls to frame, roofs to shingle. Then all of the flooring and painting and trimming need to be done, with much attention to detail.
“Home shows tend to bring out all the bells and whistles of the builders,” Rapp said.
About 16,000 people turned out for last year’s home show, which featured six homes at the Silverstone housing development in Johnston, said David Vollmar, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association. However, the opening was delayed by a month because of changes to Johnston building code.
This year’s home show is scheduled for the first three weekends in June. Vollmar said it could be one of the biggest in its 30-year history in terms of attendance and possibly in the terms of the number of houses. At least 15 houses are scheduled to be ready, but there are 21 total lots that could be built on.
Finishing everything in time for the home show will require builders to work more quickly than usual, Vollmar said, and the neighborhood will be more hectic because of all the construction happening at once. But he said he wasn’t worried about everything getting done on time.
“We’ve been doing the home show for 30-some years and it hasn’t changed,” he said. “The basements are usually going in now and the home show is in June.”
He said the only other time a home show was delayed, other than last year’s, was in 1993 when the state received record amounts of rain.
The city’s portion of the work, finishing the park, should be done on time, as well, said City Manager Carl Metzger. He said the June deadline didn’t seem to affect the price of the park, either, which will be about $750,000.
“We got a very good price, and I think the contractors are very confident they’ll be able to meet the deadline,” Metzger said.
Reporter Gunnar Olson can be reached at (515) 284-8039 or golson@dmreg.com
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