Renovation projects breathe new life into buildings

Sometimes it makes sense to build, sometimes it makes sense to lease and sometimes it makes sense to fix up an existing building.

In the outlying areas of Greeley and Fort Collins, building owners are busy doing just that — sprucing up old buildings that have outdated elements or otherwise won’t quite work for today’s commercial purposes.

Doug Lockhart, owner of Lockhart Constructors in Greeley, says renovation is a market-driven matter more than a maintenance thing. “This is not like the old homes that they don’t change or try to keep as they were,´ said Lockhart, who is doing the renovation work on the Bittersweet Plaza in Greeley. “Say you have a shopping mall and somebody else has one, only his is newer. You make yours look newer, too. The building’s fine, it just looks like the 70s. We see these things in a 20-year spread. There are some here that are even older that haven’t been renovated. You also get to keep your location, too.”

Outside of the Greeley downtown center, the main commercial renovations are being done to the former Hillside Shopping Center, the Bittersweet Shopping Center and the Centennial Commons Shopping Center. There is talk about renovation work at the Greeley Mall, but that decision is up to the Maserich Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. — mall owner — and they have made no decision yet, said Meg Patenaude, marketing manager for the mall.

Shopping centers getting makeovers

Becky Safarik, Greeley’s community-development director, said renovation work is under way at the Centennial Commons Shopping Center, where new retail and office space is being added. In addition, at the Hillside Shopping Center at the intersection of 28th Street and 11th Avenue, contractors are altering the access point to the building, adding landscaping, renovating the façade, reworking the mix of tenants and other renovations. Part of the project will also include installing landscaping at the intersection leading into the center and installing a traffic light on 11th Avenue.

The project will be renamed the University Center, said Greg Thompson, planning manager for the city. Thompson said the center will also have a new 10-pump gas station.

Safarik said Lockhart Constructors is doing renovation work at the Bittersweet Shopping Center at 10th Street and 35th Avenue, reworking restaurants and doing a general “morphing” of the building. Lockhart said that his company is doing “all kinds of things” to the outside of the 137,000-square-foot building — built in 1979 — including sprucing up its front. “There was an old cedar storefront on the outside that we altered and stuccoed,” he said.

In Fort Collins, a massive renovation project was recently completed at Touchstone, the former Homestead House furniture store at 2700 S. College Avenue. It’s still a furniture store, but the outside looks nothing like it once did.

Store manager Rob Erickson said the existing store was 40 years old. “We tore the existing décor off all the walls and totally gutted the place inside and out,” he said. “It was very old. There was a lot of wrought iron and wood.”

Southeast Fort Collins renovations

Another renovation will be just northwest of the Cinemark theatre complex at 4721 S. Timberline Road. Rhys Christensen, vice president of Realtec, a commercial real estate company in Fort Collins, said three warehouse bays in the building housing the Cold Stone Creamery on East Harmony Road are being renovated. Greg Glick, owner of the building, said work is progressing this summer on a 2,700-square-foot addition designed to make the structure more retail-friendly.

Across the street, the old Harmony school at the corner of East Harmony Road and Timberline Road was renovated in 1997 and reopened as the Harmony School Christian Early Childhood Center. Carol Tunner, historic-preservation planner for Fort Collins, said the building was originally built in 1931.

Cathy and Eric Hutchison, the couple who purchased the building, said the renovation done to the building included an inside restoration, replacement of many windows, a large addition on the structure’s west side and the relocation of a small residence on the property. Al Hauser, of Architecture One in Loveland, was the architect for the project. Hauser said the building was originally 7,720 square feet and the $1.4 million renovation increased the square footage to 8,600.

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