(Seguin) — Seguin City Hall is getting a bit of a deep cleaning. Scaffolding has gone up around portions of the municipal building in downtown Seguin. It’s all part of the effort to remove the dirt, mold and mildew spots from the outside of the building.
City Facilities and Grounds Director Greg Odom recently provided an update on the project to the Seguin City Council. Odom says they are using a chemcical solution that allows the stone to be thoroughly cleaned.
“Currently we are cleaning the exterior stone facade. We started out cleaning (with one product), but we had to move to a more aggressive solution to try to get the black off of the building. With that being said, we moved to only cleaning on the weekends, because we didn’t want to effect anyone coming in or out of the building. But we are moving forward. We are still pretty much on schedule with that. You see him with the pressure washer in this picture. We don’t use high pressure to clean this building. We are using a chemical to clean it, and that’s really just to rinse it. It’s not much more pressure than what you see out of your garden hose,” said Odom.
In addition to the cleaning, a number of repairs are being made to the building’s facade. Odom says they are looking at the damaged areas and then making the necessary improvements and repairs.
“We are repairing a lot of the spalled limestone and also the failed anchor system. So as you see the blue tape around the building or the holes cut in the building, that’s where we’ve actually cut material out that’s failed. Behind some of those spalled areas…is an anchor point. Some of those anchors have rusted over time and we are replacing those with helical stainless steel anchors, so that we won’t have that failure moving forward. We are about 80 percent completed with removing the damaged stone,” said Odom.
According to Odom, there were also mortar joints that needed removal and repair. Some damaged stones, particularly on the south side of the building were also repaired.
“Part of the project also was to route and repoint the deteriorated mortar joints. So the top three rows around the whole facility, we have cut out those mortar joints. You can see that, if you look closely at them,” said Odom. “Next, we move on to the removing of the damaged stones on the south entrance. We had one large stone…that did completely fail. It broke in two. We were lucky that it didn’t fall out of place. We’ve worked with the structural engineer on how we are going to fix this moving forward. You will see a line across the middle of that stone. Architectually, it’s not the best, but it will support all the stones moving forward from up there.”
Odom says they have tried to minimize the disruptions at City Hall while this work is being done. He says they hope to be able to wrap this up over the next few weeks.
“The scaffolding that you see on the north side of the building is there because most of the work has been done by articulating lifts that are parked out here on the street; and to not impede the traffic coming through for the (utility) pay window, that’s why we installed the scaffolding. We should have that out of here by the end of January. We are still on track to finish by the first week of February. Then we will do the final punch list for final closing on the 18th of February,” said Odom.
The work can all be viewed from the outside of the building. Seguin City Hall is located at the corner of Gonzales and River streets in the heart of the downtown area.