Facilities To-Do List:

With Spring a couple of weeks away, and the weather improving in some parts of the country, it’s an opportune time to look at seasonal facilities to-do lists from a variety of perspectives.

Some schools and colleges are already on Spring Break. Grace Grindstaff, the Senior Associate Director of Facility & Business Operations at University of North Carolina Wilmington listed a few things her team is doing right now, including:

• Deep cleaning locker room floors 

• Painting walls and patching holes 

• Deep cleaning fitness equipment

• High dusting rafters/HVAC returns

• Replacing lightbulbs 

• Double checking the life of batteries on automatic sinks and toilets

• Meeting with contractors to discuss logistics for large-scale summer projects 

At Holden Forests & Gardens in Ohio, there’s less trail and parking area maintenance to address this spring, but lots of outdoor painting and cleaning is planned. "I am looking forward to breaking ground on the new Hershey’s Childrens Garden Treehouse,” said Nico Viola. “This large, ADA accessible structure will be completed late summer and will be the new crown jewel of the garden.”

Heather Owens, a lighting designer from Cundiff Engineering, illuminated a few Spring facilities lighting to-dos.

“For a facility, I would recommend dusting down fixtures, checking for older fixtures that have burnt out lamps and replacing them with an efficient LED alternative lamps or fixtures and making sure the new lamp/fixture matches the color temperature of the existing lamps/fixtures in the space,” she said. 

“When adding new fixtures to your facility, consider adding a daylight sensor (which is by code necessary for many states) and this will naturally turn off or dim your facility or office lights down, based on the amount of natural light that is presented into the space via a skylight or window,” she added.

Spring is the ideal time to streamline processes and balance planned vs. demand work. The more preventative maintenance tasks that are developed, the better systems will run and the easier it will be to ultimately stay within budgets. 

What's on your checklist? Send your comments to communications@arcfacilities.com.