Until 2008 it was the home of Windsor’s first Home Depot store. Since that time, the store sat closed and vacant — and after Home Depot moved to another Windsor location — it became home to a strange phenomenon: hundreds of seagulls nesting there.
All that is in the past as local developer Rocco Tullio’s Rock Developments is redeveloping the site, next door to Windsor’s highly lucrative Devonshire shopping mall, into a four unit commercial plaza.
On a recent visit, a few centimetres of water covered the floor as a result of a rainstorm the night before, with the water entering through large gaps in the former big box store’s roof. Those gaps were created from tearing out as many as 28 former skylights that had been embedded in the almost 110,000 square foot gravel roof.
“We’re taking all the skylights off, infilling them with structural steel,” Windsor-based TCI Titan Contracting president Art Ussoletti said.
What’s going in there is first, R-32 insulation, and then a Firestone UltraPly 60-mil TPO (Thermoplastic Polyolefin) rubberized roof, a blend of polypropylene and ethylene-propylene rubber, sealed by hot air welding.
“It’s by far a more expensive type of roof but it’s something that now is becoming an industrial standard,” Ussoletti said. “Rock Developments — that’s their go-to roof.”
Rock Developments has developed numerous stand alone and small shopping plazas the width and breath of southwestern Ontario including for such clients as Bulk Bin, Bank of Montreal, Home Outfitters and Sobeys.
This high profile central Windsor parcel of land was slow to develop simply because of Windsor’s weak economy.
“The retail market has been soft here over that time but now that interest rates are still holding well and with the renewal of the automotive contracts, housing is back on the rise,” president Rick Tullio said.
Signed tenants are a Marshalls, JYSK, Dollar Tree and a fourth store still in negotiations for a site that has been renamed Windsor Commons. The former Home Depot garden centre will be a fifth pad for an overall 100,000 sq. ft. of space.
The total price for demolition and renovation is $30 million.
Tullio and a co-owner are also demolishing a former 12 acre Union Gas administrative and maintenance centre next door, though no tenants have been lined up yet.
“We just decided the building was outdated and had some asbestos in it so we decided to level it, and just clean up the site and get it ready for future,” Tullio said.
Home Depot had removed virtually all the shelving. But TCI Titan detached dozens of fans mounted to the ceiling used for airing the store, and which were heaped in a large bin. They’ll be taken apart and recycled. The demolition included removal of old electrical and installation of new.
“The schedule is pretty aggressive so we’re demolishing and we’re reconstructing at the same time,” Ussoletti said.
The first tenant has to be in there by Oct. 31 so it’s a “very aggressive” schedule, he said.
As the roof is remade and new HVAC system attached, the interior had new studded walls. “Those are all the demising walls for the new tenants,” Ussoletti said. Next will come drywall, millwork, floors and paint.
Titan TCI is working off of a corporate template or “prototypical store” model for each of the separate stores though they have been “modified slightly to meet” the site’s configuration. The floor was also cut and water and sanitary lines laid.
If there is any complexity it is scheduling the trades.
“We have to make sure that the skylights come off at the right time, the structural steel goes in at the right time, so that the roof membrane can go in at the right time,” Ussoletti said.
“And then there’s removal of the old rooftop units. Each store has their different mandates, their different templates, so we have to coordinate with them, our sub trades, and with Rock Developments.”
Ussoletti called it “an orchestra of different trades.”
All the tenants will face to the front façade, which is the only wall being demolished.
The pre-stressed panels were pulled away by an excavator using a Grapple Thumb with heavy duty hydraulic cylinders, low-wear serrated teeth and of high strength steel alloy construction.
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