Unforeseen problems, delays, cost overruns — elevator repair jobs rarely go off without a hitch, which can cause big dents in a building's repair budget. In today’s episode, Donald Gelestino, president at Champion Elevator, shares two cautionary tales that offer the same lesson: When tackling elevator repairs, you’d be wise to expect the unexpected. Donald Gelestino is interviewed by Paula Chin of Habitat Magazine.
Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!
Unforeseen problems, delays, cost overruns — elevator repair jobs rarely go off without a hitch, which can cause big dents in a building's repair budget. In today’s episode, Donald Gelestino, president at Champion Elevator, shares two cautionary tales that offer the same lesson: When tackling elevator repairs, you’d be wise to expect the unexpected. Donald Gelestino is interviewed by Paula Chin of Habitat Magazine.
Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!
Paula Chin: Welcome to Problem Solved. A conversation about problems that have been solved in New York co-op and condo buildings. I'm Paula Chin, and my guest today is Don Gelestino, President of Champion Elevator. Welcome, Don.
Don Gelestino: Hi, Paula. Welcome. Nice to be here with you.
Paula Chin: Nice to have you. Elevator repairs are an inevitable fact of life at co-ops and condos, requiring boards to spend months planning for them. But problems often crop up that no one could have predicted, which happened recently at some buildings where you thought you were tackling a routine job. Can you tell us about it?
Don Gelestino: Yeah, sure. They are definitely common. One of the most recent jobs that I'd like to talk about is a really beautiful building, high-end building down at Tribeca, 100 Barkly Street. It's one of our great customers. It's a big job, $1.4 million job, and a really class-A building. And we encountered a bracket problem with the mounting of the guide rails.
Paula Chin: Tell me about it. So how many elevators? Were you going in there to do repairs, or a modernization? And tell me what unexpected hurdle you jumped into.
Don Gelestino: Sure. This is a four passenger elevator group modernization that we were called in. They were all overhead traction elevators, 2,500 pound capacity each, which is pretty normal, especially in a building that size. It was a 34 stop job, so you had four 34-story elevators all in line, pretty much what you would call a cookie-cutter, plain vanilla type job. What happened, we were in the job about four weeks, and our mechanic was riding the elevator car top on inspection mode, and he noticed that the car had some excessive lateral movement in certain areas of the hoistway, which is very uncommon. So he did a little bit of investigation, and he noticed that there was brackets that hold the rails that were moving. The normal thing would be to laser align them, put some shims in and tighten them up.
Don Gelestino: Well, funny part of it is, there was no way to tighten these brackets. After further investigation, we found out that next to those four elevators, years and years ago, there were two more elevators in a different shaftway. And what they did was, they actually had put bolts and brackets through the terracotta walls, that would hold these brackets to the elevators we were working on. But what they did with the elevators that they removed, they used the shaftway as raceways for HVAC docks, other wiring, and stuff in the building, that go from the basement to the roofs. And they blocked and cut out those intermediate brackets. So the only way for us to do any repairs to this was to actually chop out the terracotta wall itself, put in tube steel all the way around the hoistway, attach that to house structural steel, welded in, and then adapt the rail brackets, and attach them to this new structure that we had to create.
Paula Chin: Well, how much did that end up costing the condo? And what kind of time delay was there?
Don Gelestino: Interesting enough, and these are the things that you really cannot be prepared for, in my opinion, thank God it was a class-A building, very high-end luxury apartments, the co-op and condo board did have, obviously funds, to step into a problem like this. But the supports were $491,500, which is tremendous. We had a fixed price job, which was really 1.455 for all four cars. So when you look at the amount of excess spend, it's tremendous. 34% of the total contract price was an unexpected change order. And money is money, where you really dig in, the job itself was fixed price for 94 days of labor to perform all the work, 47 days per shift, and it actually ended up taking 120 days, so 60 extra days per shift, just because of this unforeseen added work. It added 24 weeks to the 56-week schedule.
Paula Chin: Wow.
Don Gelestino: Yeah.
Paula Chin: And I presume that was a big inconvenience to the unit owners?
Don Gelestino: Yeah. And there's never a good time to modernize an elevator in general, when you mix something like this into the mix, it's even more discomforting. And even if you were to mix in and schedule overrun, the people get a little bit up in arms, and then when you add and factor a costing like this, I mean, it's like getting hit twice. So we're glad that we all got through this together, and we did it the best we could, the fastest we could do it, but imagine if the building had to do a refi, or didn't have the funds, it could be a big, huge problem, in my opinion.
Paula Chin: Well, I understand you ran into a different problem at a job at a Brooklyn condo, and I'm not sure, were they prepared? Tell us what happened there.
Don Gelestino: Yeah, so funny enough, these are like the unforeseen that no one ever would imagine. So when we bid on a job, we usually generally receive a spec from a consultant, and some work is called out for the elevator contractor, and some work is called out by others. So this is two basement traction, seven-stop apartment building type stuff, co-ops and condos that run generally seven-stories, the very traditional type building that you find up and down Ocean Parkway in those areas. And there was a simple line in it, mainline disconnects, which is by others. Which, it's nothing, our electric all goes, and we plug into that basically, and we take three phases off of that, and then we do all of our modernization work after the mainline disconnect.
Don Gelestino: My mechanic was going into the mainline disconnect, and he noticed that the wires coming into it were very brittle. Now, we didn't have to do anything. Didn't really even have to say anything about it, but he took the initiative to take some pictures, send it to the supervisor, super sent it in to the project manager, we shared it with the property manager, who then brought it to the board, and they decided to call an electrician to see, what do you have to do before the mainline disconnect? What ended up happening wasn't even part of the elevator modernization per se, but it ended up, these three wires that came into the machine room for the elevator, they had tapped off down the run somewhere in the basement for the compactor, they also tapped off for some basement riding, and all of the wires were about 65 to 70 years old, and they were feeding all different parts of this building in the basement.
Don Gelestino: So while the cost of this was about $11,000 per elevator, so $22,000, that what we saw and heard about on our end, not our quote, but there was also other interruptions in the building, they had to shut down some compactors, they had to rewire some lighting, egress and exit lighting, that they somewhere tapped off to. And it also delayed the job a little bit, because they did have to shut down some of the power coming in. It was a little bit of a challenge, and again $22,000 in a small co-op or condo building, that kind of money is substantial, especially when you're looking at that being in the middle of a job, our job was a $548,000 two-car, duplex basement modernization. So the board's already feeling the pain of a $550,000 modernization, and then a $22,000 issue arises, that doesn't even have anything to do with the elevator. So talk about it being kind of blindsided and out of the norm. That just happened recently too.
Paula Chin: Are these kind of unexpected problems unusual? How often do boards run into them? How often do you run into them?
Don Gelestino: About 15% of the jobs have complications, and cost overruns. I would say another 20%. There were 20% overruns that don't even have anything to do with complications, those are sometimes just logistical things that a board, or a co-op, or condo should be aware of. If somebody says the job's going to be nine weeks, you're better off figuring for 10, if it comes in at nine, you're good, if it comes in any earlier, it's a mini miracle, but you'll be definitely looking at 15% of the jobs have complications that will lead to cost overruns.
Paula Chin: In which case, boards should be prepared for that, and have access to more money. Is that right?
Don Gelestino: Yeah, 100%. You don't want to have a push your capital expenditure to the point that you really went all the way to the well. I really think you should keep something on hand just for that rainy day type of an issue that can happen, because they do.
Paula Chin: Any final words of advice for boards, Don?
Don Gelestino: You don't want to really scramble at the last minute and try to figure these things out. There are many great elevator consultants, and great elevator companies out there that could have some input. I think when you're interviewing for consultants, or interviewing for companies, ask them if they've noticed anything when they looked at the job. Even the best of the best are going to still come up, and things will happen that nobody could ever really see.
Paula Chin: Don, that's all great advice. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Don Gelestino: You're very welcome.