Work started in mid-March to raise the walls at the new Student Housing Commons on NIC's Comox Valley campus and progress is already visible.
The reason is the way the building panels are assembled: offsite by employees of Ron Anderson & Sons Ltd. (RAS), the company overseeing the construction.
"It's pretty exciting watching it go up," said Chris Udy, NIC Director of Capital Planning and Projects. "It goes up so quickly."
Once complete, NIC's student housing buildings will provide 217 beds for students, including 157 in a larger building and 60 for students with families in a separate building, as well as common spaces throughout the site. It is designed to be an inclusive, accessible, Indigenized, welcoming space to make all students, including those with families, feel connected.
Matt Kiley, Chief Operating Officer for RAS, recently gave an NIC contingent a tour of their facility in Chemainus, where the walls and floors are put together before shipment to the housing site in Courtenay.
The process is referred to as off-site construction. For this project, putting the panels together elsewhere brings certain advantages, such as the crew at the build site requiring less space.
"Our ideal scenario is we start building and put it right on the truck," Kiley said.
They are putting out two full trucks of wall panels a day, which equals about 7,000-8,000 square feet. Right now, they are working on four or five active framing jobs, such as the NIC project, along with projects in the concrete or in the finishing stages or ones early in the process, such as design or bidding.
"All the employees are local," Kiley said.
RAS employees assemble a panel at their Chemainus facility, which will then be sent to the build site at NIC's Comox Valley campus.
The process helps keep costs under control. It also produces less waste because of methods such as pre-measuring, and they find ways to incorporate smaller lengths of studs that might otherwise go to waste. The approach fits in with the green features of the build. The project proponent, Urban One, which oversees the entire project, has committed to using mass timber elements to produce a building that will meet Step 4 of the BC Energy Step Code the highest for commercial buildings.
At one point on the tour, Kiley points out sections of roofing composed of compressed scrap wood that go through RAS's optimizing saw. As he says, this project aligns with the province's Wood First Initiative to get more jobs for people in B.C. using wood from within the province.
The off-site process means other benefits. For sheeting for the individual wall panels, it takes far less time and requires less decision-making than it would on site.
"They're small efficiencies, but they start to add up," Kiley said.
For the pieces to be assembled at the Courtenay build site, they are sized in Chemainus using the iN4 Hornet saw, a MiTek product that Kiley calls the "heart" of the operation. The process notes all the dimensions, and numbers them based on layout plans, with the information stamped on each piece.
"We're cutting them in the order that they'll need them," Kiley said. "We try to make the movement of materials more fluid."
Offsite designers put together computer blueprints, which are adapted and sent to the crew assembling the pieces at the Comox Valley campus. This simplifies the process of putting the buildings together, which Kiley likens to creating their own IKEA furniture instructions.
The Student Housing Commons is scheduled to open for September 2025. For more information on the project, see www.engage.nic.bc.ca/housing-commons.
