It isn’t the prettiest wrapping job you’ll see this time of year.

But when the plastic sheeting around the Hedge Hall addition does come off, probably in January, you can expect a fine present indeed: neat courses of brick and granite that masons are laying now.

The plastic, explains project manager Paul Farnsworth, retains the warmth that a propane space heater is pumping into the building. The mortar that sticks bricks together develops its strength from a chemical reaction, and that reaction doesn’t happen if the temperature drops below freezing.

The workers are probably OK with the heat, too. There are two big heaters on the site, one feeding Hedge and the other Roger Williams Hall — that one has a plywood cover so workers won’t do damage when they toss down old roof slates. The heat is piped into the buildings from outside so the heaters won’t take up valuable floor space inside.

Another development at Hedge is taking place in plain sight, as roofers are laying the slates atop the other layers of roofing. Campus Construction Update, ever the connoisseur in construction matters, was pleased to see slate going on rather than asphalt shingles or the doubled-over trash bags that we use at home.

It was a simple matter of the price being right, says Farnsworth. “It was an alternate during bidding, and we could afford it. We’re all happy.”

Taking place in pane sight is the window installation at Hedge. Aside from a few openings that will be left vacant to pass building materials through, that job should be done by the week of Dec. 6 with the placement of the large arched windows that are such a distinguishing feature of the building.

And inside Hedge, Farnsworth says, “things are happening fast.”

On the second story, floor sheathing is down, and “they’re going to town with wall studs. On the first floor, the sheathing should be finished by Dec. 4 and then they’ll start with those walls.” On the third floor, carpenters are putting up the wood that will hold up the ceiling, and then the floor and wall work can start.

“Wherever they’ve framed the bathrooms out, the plumbers are right behind,” he adds. “They’ve put in all the carriers — the heavy cast-iron things that hold the fixtures in the wall. And the electricians have started to rough in outlets at the walls.”

The Hedge-Roger Williams project is approaching the greatest diversity of building trades at work, from carpenters to electricians to plumbers to roofers. Farnsworth estimates that, on the busiest days, there are 60 workers on the site.

Across the lot at Roger Bill, the focus is still the roof, as workers have begun attaching wooden rafters to that dramatic steel frame. Doing the rafters and sheathing them will take about four weeks if all goes well. Also on high, the slates are being stripped from the section of the old roof that was retained, on the Alumni Walk end of the building.

In the meantime, the nice shiny metal wall studs on the Bill’s addition will soon be hidden behind a layer of yellow exterior sheathing that’s going up now. That yellow material will then be concealed by a blue vapor barrier, which in turn will be covered with pink insulation. Pastelicious!

Also pending at the Bill is the rebuilding of the brick porch on the side facing Hedge — a project that Farnsworth has been dangling in front of Campus Construction Update for months, like doughnuts before Homer Simpson. A hallmark feature of the building, the porch had deteriorated past the point where mere repointing would put it right, and will be completely redone.

Finally, watch for a new electrical transformer to replace the unit next to the Bill. The replacement, leased from Central Maine Power, will feed both buildings. “At the same time, we’ll be pulling in the feeder cables,” Farnsworth says. “So, hopefully by the end of next week, we’ll be on the new electrical service.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions, reminiscences and comments about campus improvements. Please e-mail staff writer Doug Hubley, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

Thunderstorms on July 21 that unleashed torrents of rain and spawned three tornadoes in southern Maine also made their mark, happily minor, on the Hedge/Roger Williams construction site.

Winds, which gusted up to 90 mph in some parts of the state, knocked over 40 feet of the fence around the site. “We called the contractor,” Portland-based Wright-Ryan, “and the superintendent was nearby, and he just came over and put it back,” says project manager Paul Farnsworth.

In non-cataclysmic construction news, the first phase of creating a steel framework within Hedge Hall is all but complete. Steelworkers have a few more pieces of steel to put in, and then it’s just a matter of squaring things up and tightening the bolts, says Farnsworth.

This steel is supporting the structure up to the roof. The next batch of steel for Hedge will support the roof itself, but that won’t happen for a while. In fact, the next steel shipment, due during the second week of August, is bound for Roger Williams Hall.

Also at Hedge, work continues on the foundation for the addition that will face Alumni Walk. Inside the building, workers will drill the hole for the hydraulic piston that will lift and lower the elevator. This requires dangling a chain down inside the new elevator shaft to bear the weight of a big hydraulic drill that will bore the 14-inch-diameter, 39-foot-deep hole.

Over at Roger Williams, masons are reaching the end of the brick work — cleaning and repointing — that has brightened up the building’s facade. (Staring at the spiffed-up walls one morning, Campus Construction Update was pleased to notice, for the first time, decorative courses of Greek key and rope masonry that hadn’t previously been so apparent.) The north and final wall will likely be done by the end of next week.

Speaking of bricks, if you pass the Bill on the east side, by New Commons and Alumni Gym, look closely at the wall. Toward the left, near where the windows have been filled in, look for two slits that have been cut from ground level to the roof.

Once the interior has been shored up, Farnsworth says, that section of wall will be taken right out. Similar to what happened at Hedge, the opening will provide access to an addition.

Farnsworth adds that the folks who build with concrete blocks on this project are all but done. Their last bit of work is on the elevator shaft, which needs just a few more courses of blocks under the roof.

Progress is progressing on the old foundation of Roger Williams. On the inside, the last of the “one-sided walls” — actually a new layer of concrete applied to reinforce an existing wall — was poured this week. Outside, the next couple of weeks will see the end of the dampproofing, drainage work and concrete spraying that will prepare the foundation for the next 50 or 100 years.

Notes from Underground: At Roger Bill, watch for the removal in early August of asphalt pavers on the New Commons plaza near the 1910 Gate. Workers will be excavating for a drainage line that will link to a vault in front of Alumni Gym.

Just behind the fence next to Alumni Walk, a long stretch of new steam line is being welded up. It replaces a line that was in the way of the Hedge addition. The pipe links to a new steam vault at the east end of Hedge.

Also in the world of campus steam, installation of the replacement line between Hedge and Ladd Library should start next week. The pit across the service road will be large, Farnsworth says, to accommodate water and telecom conduits too. The road is closed to vehicle and pedestrian traffic until Aug. 20. Take Alumni Walk or the stairs under Ladd if you need to cross campus east or west, Farnsworth advises.

Two old abandoned steam lines at Roger Williams, in the meantime, are coming out, a process necessitating asbestos abatement. And the campus’ very oldest steam line, in case you were wondering, has also been consigned to fond memory. Scheduled for September completion, workers are replacing this pipe that connects Lane and Pettigrew halls — hence the recent commotion near Lake Andrews.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Read this week’s news about the Garcelon Field renovation.

Nails and nails.

Nails poking out of scrap wood that used to be the walls inside Roger Williams Hall. Nails lying pointedly in wait for a soft-soled shoe. Bent nails scattered on the floor in the wake of a construction worker who, walking back and forth with a crowbar, yanks nails out of the floorboards, one after the next, over and over.

And here we’d been thinking that it would be fun to gut a building. But not for the nail-pulling guy.

What happens to all those nails? We asked Paul Farnsworth, project manager for the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls.

General contractor Wright-Ryan Construction separates its waste stream, he replied, and the nail metal is recycled. “We ask for that in our specifications, but that’s a standard procedure for Wright-Ryan.”

Included in the waste recovery are nails still embedded in wood that has been ripped out of the two buildings and flung out the windows into trash containers for the past two months. When the wood is ground up for use as biomass fuel, magnets extract the metal for reuse.

We encountered the nail-pulling guy and other workers during a May 18 photo tour of Hedge and Bill. The many other impressive sights included a man busting up concrete in Hedge’s basement with a jackhammer mounted on a compact tractor.

But what really awed Campus Construction Update was two mountains of broken wood — well, one mountain and one foothill — on the fourth floor of Roger Bill. These random scrap heaps of wood (and nails!) were once the walls that you pinned your Betty Grable or Jimi Hendrix pictures on, and that you pounded against when the noise from next door was cutting into precious sleep.

Now the remnants of these walls are headed for an open window and the trash container waiting below. One difference from the old days, Farnsworth pointed out, is that a lot more wood goes into a bin now than previously.

“They get charged by the number of containers,” he explained, “so they’re very good at stacking it to get the most out of each load.” That is, someone climbs into the bin and moves the wood around.

Speaking of the Bill’s windows, they too will be pretty much gone by the week of May 24. As with Hedge, the intact units will be sold by a salvage broker for reuse.

Otherwise at the Bill, the concrete crew will soon pour footers for the steel skeleton and pour one-sided walls to reinforce what’s there now. Excavators will trench around the foundation for drainage and dampproofing work similar to what’s been done at Hedge.

In Hedge’s basement, most of the concrete has been poured is done. A major exception is the pit for the new elevator. That’ll require a rigging job that Campus Construction Update is eager to see.

Workers will run steel beams horizontally through holes cut in a concrete wall. Supported at the ends, that steel will take the weight that the wall is now bearing — holding the building up, you see — and then the wall section underneath the steel will be cut away so the pit can be built. Then the wall will be replaced.

Up in the light of day, workers today were filling in the trench around the Historic Quad side of Hedge. Once that’s done, workers can erect staging for the masons who will repoint some brickwork.

Higher up still, the roof removal we talked about the other week is still pending. With recycling on our mind (along with nails), we asked if the roof slates could be reclaimed or reused.

“Although slate is rock, it doesn’t have an unlimited life,” Farnsworth said. “Are there pieces in there you could reuse? Likely, but by the time you’ve handled it 50,000 times, you don’t come out ahead.”

Notes from underground: The new gas line between Hedge and Ladd Library was laid late last week. That line needed rerouting because the addition to Hedge will be built over its old course, next to Alumni Walk. For a similar reason, an old clay sewer pipe on the same side of Hedge will be replaced next week, since it won’t be too accessible underneath the expanded building.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions and comments, unless they’re mean, about the Hedge-Roger Williams renovation project. Please e-mail staff writer Doug Hubley at this E-mail, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Writing this on Earth Day, Campus Construction Update is pleased to note that the Hedge and Roger Williams renovation project is showing some green.

As workers yank off Hedge’s roof in the coming weeks, the sturdy old planks that form the roof decking have been spoken for by a company that will repurpose them. “It was someone who came through and saw them way back,” says project manager Paul Farnsworth.

The windows that are fast disappearing, giving poor old Hedge a gap-toothed look, have also been claimed for reuse, though by a different company.

That’s not all. “The wooden beams that serve as roof joists, we’re reusing on site,” Farnsworth says. “There’s also some steel structure that we’re going to use in the basement for shoring,” although these parts will ultimately be scrapped.

Roof work isn’t all that’s up at Hedge. Work is afoot in the basement too. In fact, “things are really going to start picking up” in the next few weeks, Farnsworth says. “It’s exciting.”

The stage is set to put a new supporting wall underneath the existing foundation and to install footers for a steel frame that will hold Hedge up. This is work that we described in this space two weeks ago, but there was a little chore that we neglected to mention.

Built in 1890, Hedge got an addition in 1926, and the basement floor of the new section was lower than the original. So the past couple of weeks, workers have been mining out a mess of concrete to make a single level from the split-level floor.

Outside, workers will apply “shotcrete” — essentially, concrete sprayed on with a hose — on the foundation to make a flat surface for the application of damp-proofing.

Meanwhile, you may have noticed that the dormer on the Pettengill side of the building has a big hole in it. That’s the beginning of the end for the dormer, which will be completely removed in the coming weeks.

And speaking of big holes, there will soon be a doozy on that same side of the building. The basement doorway that was widened a while ago to admit machinery will be expanded again — all the way up the side of the building. That opening is a major connection to the new addition and stair tower, signature features of the renovation.

At Roger Bill, too, a basement doorway has been embiggened so that the kind of Bobcat that has wheels and an engine can get in where the biped variety used to roam. Some concrete will be cut out to make way for footers to support a new steel skeleton, but nothing on the scale of the Hedge work.

Upstairs, the gutting continues. Most of the metal stuff such as heating ducts and piping is out, and “you’ll see a lot more wood coming out as they strip the floors down to the subflooring,” says Farnsworth.

That wood is recycled, too, but not for anything decorative that you might later admire in House Beautiful. You can’t get it out without breaking it up, says Farnsworth, so it’s ground up by a company for other uses.

Notes from underground: Faucets ran dry for a small part of the campus on April 22 thanks to work at Hedge. The building’s water shutoff valve was located in the footprint of the forthcoming addition, necessitating its relocation, which meant turning off the H20 for Dana, Pettengill and Lane halls. That was squared away by noon.

And the tidy slit trench running through the parking lot behind Alumni Gym should be all healed up by the weekend of April 24. That trench was cut to reroute the main fiber optic line that connects Merrill Gym and its companion buildings to the campus computer network. The line formerly ran under the lawn behind Roger Bill, right where the addition will be built.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions and comments, unless they’re mean, about the Hedge-Roger Williams renovation project. Please e-mail staff writer Doug Hubley at this E-mail, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

Along with the spring crocuses, spray-painted lines, pastel plastic tape and little yellow flags dotted the soil this week to herald a season of new growth.

But these manmade blossoms portend not the awakening of verdant nature but instead Bates’ latest major construction project. And the impending renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls became much more noticeable March 24 as workers started closing off their work site behind a chain-link fence.

Known to most Batesies as residences, Hedge and the Bill will be repurposed for academic use. The plan is to consolidate, under the two roofs, programs now dispersed across campus and upgrade their accommodations.

So Roger Bill will house most of the college’s language departments and programs, along with related operations. The philosophy and religious studies departments and the environmental studies program will take over Hedge, coming from their longtime homes in wood-framed houses at the edge of campus.

Both buildings will offer new classrooms, departmental lounges and thesis rooms, common areas and offices. General contractor for the project is Wright-Ryan Construction of Portland, whose other academic projects include the transformation of a former downtown department store into the Maine College of Art, as well as buildings at the University of Southern Maine, Bowdoin and the University of New England.

The renovations will also transform these venerable buildings, dating to the 1890s, from big old energy wasters into models of energy efficiency. And a third goal for the project is to help define the east side of the central campus, bringing more light, spatial identity and activity to the grassy zone where the Alumni Walk meets the New Commons. Additions will also afford easy handicapped access.

But, with construction scheduled for completion in summer 2011, all of those excitements are a ways off. In the meantime, we must look for gratification in other things.

Such as structural steel.

The transformation of Hedge and Bill will begin in a really substantive way when workers start building new steel skeletons inside the buildings. It’s a matter of both safety and adherence to state building codes.

Currently, the brick shells support the weight of the structures, and that’s been fine because snow has never accumulated heavily on the roofs. Lacking insulation, the roofs allowed interior heat to simply melt the snow away. But once the buildings are insulated, including their tops, the snow will pile up. Hence the need for the new steel load-bearing frames (not to mention new roofs), which will also help the buildings withstand stresses from wind and earth movements.

To make way for the steel, the wooden wall framing that remained after the buildings were closed and gutted will itself be removed. The steel work will require new footings inside Hedge and the Bill, and will afford the exciting spectacle of girders being lowered in through holes in the roofs.

But don’t buy your popcorn yet: The steel work won’t happen at least until late spring, says project manager Paul Farnsworth.

Meanwhile, there’s the fencing and consequent changes to campus traffic patterns. Once the fences are up, Farnsworth says, topsoil will be removed and reserved for later use.

And some of the paper birches planted in 2007 will be removed to make way for excavation, but many will likely be used to replace dead or weak birch trees along Alumni Walk. “At the end of the project,” Farnsworth told the campus in an e-mail this week, “any removed birches will be replaced with new specimens.”

The fence started last Wednesday will enclose both buildings and their surroundings, in a rough rectangle totaling about 60,000 square feet. If you are trying to get behind the historic Quad and Alumni Walk, you’ll need to veer east toward New Commons or west beyond Dana Chemistry.

A second fence has gone in on the Library Quad. Its purpose, explains Farnsworth, is to channel pedestrian access to the poetically named Service Road, which runs between Ladd Library and the Alumni Gym-Gray Cage complex. That will be the contractors’ main access to the work site.

The start of construction coincided, more or less, with the college’s announcement of a Climate Action Plan that projects carbon neutrality for Bates by 2020. The use of energy-efficient building measures is a significant piece of the plan, and the Hedge-Bill project makes ample use of such measures, such as highly efficient insulation, optimal access to daylight to reduce dependence on artificial light, and gizmos such as occupancy sensors that kill the lights in empty rooms and carbon-dioxide sensors that tell the ventilation system when to kick in.

In the hands of project architects JSA Inc., of Portsmouth, N.H. (whose portfolio includes buildings at USM, UNE, Endicott College and The Jackson Laboratory) the renovated buildings will also change the spaces that surround them. Currently showing to the passing parade on Alumni Walk a drab afterthought of a doorway, Hedge will gain a substantial new main entrance with a glassy stair tower next to it. The tower’s lights will cast a welcome brightness during winter’s dark days.

Roger Bill, meanwhile, will expand backward into the current flat lawn with a pavilion that expands the interior space by about a quarter. A glass and metal stair tower will connect and harmonize the two structures.

And if you want a visual, hang on. Large signs depicting the finished projects will appear at the site soon.

We’re listening: Please send your comments and questions about the Hedge-Bill renovation to Doug Hubley, staff writer, Bates College Office of Communications and Media Relations, at this dhubley@bates.edu. Please state “Construction Update” in the subject line.