Happy Holidays & To All A Good Night from the UD Campus!

Rodney basement "experiment" expanding

A plan this spring to change the appearance of the basements in the Rodney Commons' buildings has been successful and is now set to expand to the A/B and E/F basements. The new design includes additional lighting, an area carpet, new and different furniture, and the centerpiece is a new flat big screen TV. Most all of the work involved in transforming the areas is completed by our UD Housing Maintenance Staff, including all the electrical and carpentry work. Some furniture has been re-used by re-upholstering pieces through our Housing Upholstery Shop. Although the start in A/B includes just the initial framing of the new walls, the plan is to have everything complete by the beginning of the Spring Semester in early February 2010.

Dickinson kitchens back in play

Today I have a video blog on some changes that we are making in the Dickinson Commons areas in order to improve the appearence and functionality of the spaces. Dickinson is the only complex without public area kitchens, but by working with Kevin McSweeney, the UD Fire Marshall, we have come up with a plan to re-establish the kitchen areas and also upgrade the whole functionality of the Commons Lounges. Future plans include painting and new big screen TVs for the Commons Lounge areas.

Triple furniture done right

In support of the extended housing program, we try to provide the best possible furniture experience, given that we don't want to load up a traditional double room with too many pieces so that there is no room to function. Many years ago we started buying a better quality desk that was closer in style and functionality to the "permanent" desks that the other two residents would be using. In addition, we purchased third beds that could be adjusted up and down like the permanent ones to increase storage space. This week we received delivery of some additional new extended housing desks that will allow us to purge the oldest desks still in the pipeline. Although we haven't come close to the number in many years, we have enough extended housing furniture to set up 200 rooms if needed. This fall we started with a total of 112 rooms and are down to less than 70 now. At the end of the Fall Semester all those still in extended housing will be offered a new assignment.

Re-working Rodney Spaces

In the past two years we have tried to give the Rodney Complex some updates to its' "sixties" appearence by using paint and flooring to change the dated look of some of the spaces. This week the Rodney A/B Upstairs Commons was the focus, with new carpeting to complement paint and fabric bulletin boards that were added last year. This time the carpet was installed wall to wall to give the area more of a living room feel. In addition to the Commons Lounges, the brick in the tubeways was painted white to brighten up that area and take away from the institutional look of the basic brick. More efforts will be made in the future to address all the areas in Rodney that require an update. Hopefully students that lived in Rodney in past years will return and notice the positive changes.

A "Sit In" at Christiana East Tower

In the elevator lobby of the Christiana East Tower, an opportunity was found to create a small bench area where residents and guests could sit down and hang out while waiting for each other to come down and meet up. This suggestion made by Residence Life is being brought to life in the Housing Carpenter Shop as designed and being built by our staff. The new bench area will be upholstered when complete for a comfortable spot to relax in an area that was previously underutilized.

Follow-Up on "Get Out Green" Program

At closing this past spring I wrote briefly about a program developed by Residence Life to encourage students to leave their dorm room for the summer in a way that lessens the impact on the environment. The program was called, "Get Out Green." Facilities played a part in it by encouraging residents in Independence Hall to not throw their room carpets in the dumpster but to put them in two areas near the exits of the buildings that would be later collected and be recycled by our carpet installation contractor. This carpet pile from Independence West was trucked to Wilmington, for a total of 184 pieces of carpet in various sizes that did not get thrown away in a landfill. Although the program has started out small in just one complex, we hope to expand the program to all the complexes at some point in the future. It probably saved us at least one full dumpsters' worth of carpet that was sent to a factory to give the discarded pieces of carpet a new life.