Upgrades: Retrofitting the Original Monastery
It has been awhile, so you know things are busy at the monastery!
Sr. Judith Miryam points to one of the sprinklers above a window in our stairwell
When we began the journey of adding a new wing to our existing monastery, we discovered that we would have to do a little retrofitting of the original structure once the wing was completed. It has been over a year now that we all (and many of you!) have enjoyed the new wing, so earlier this year the time came to switch our attention to the retrofitting. Having been built long before fire sprinklers were a thing, our monastery was “grandfathered” in.
Building the new wing meant also getting the original building up to code. Thus our monastery has been overrun with workers running pipes, drilling holes, constructing drop ceilings and soffits, and everything else that goes with installing a sprinkler system.
Work had to stop temporarily when New Jersey was at its height of the Covid pandemic, but thankfully construction was able to start up again. The workers are held to a high standard in order to minimize the risk of infection, and the sisters keep away as much as possible from the areas they are working in.
Drilling through our walls and floors means a lot of fine white dust getting everywhere. Plastic sheeting was hung to protect our library on the “ramp” in the Professed Dorm. (Yes, we have a library in our dorm. We are Dominicans, what did you expect??) Unfortunately, our long hallways pose a fire risk .This meant the installation of fire doors (and walls to hold them!) at strategic points in the monastery.
Sprinkler pipes blend in with all the other pipes in wires running along the ceiling in the basement.
It might seem like a lot of piping running throughout the monastery, in some places exposed, in others covered by a soffit or drop ceiling. However, our monastery was built to last for many centuries to come, so over the years the walls and ceilings have acquired an array of wires and pipes which cannot be hidden within the solid walls. What’s a few more pipes?
