We’re on the Move Tomorrow!

Renewal construction updates (almost) as they happen, for the week of March 7, 2016.

As we announced in our last construction update, during the next two days, all of your Temple staff will be moving into their temporary offices in the School Wing, thereby allowing us to remain on campus at 1950 Bathurst St., offering all of our amazing programs and activities, during the balance of Phase 1 construction of our beloved Renewal Project.  As you all know, Phase 1 includes our transformative light filled Central Atrium, new Family Chapel, Library, Coffee Shop, Youth Lounge and much much more, all in a LEED Silver Certified, environmentally friendly building.

With a move like this, there will be some unavoidable disruption to the outstanding service that our staff strives to give, but every effort will be made to minimize any inconvenience.  Here is our plan for Thursday and Friday of this week:

• The telephone system will remain active. For a couple of days however, the telephone sets themselves will be located in the old offices.  Staff will do their best to retrieve messages and return calls frequently, but during the move they might physically be elsewhere in the building, tied up moving their personal items to their new offices and may not be as responsive as normal to your questions.
• Mid-afternoon Friday, telephone service will be completely cut off for a couple of hours for the switch-over, and if all goes according to plan, will be restored by 5:00 p.m. the same day.
• The computer server will be shut down at 5:00 p.m. today.  This will limit staff access to stored files and may impact the email server but staff will continue to be on-site and at your service. Staff members who have devices such as tablets or smart phones will be connected to the internet via our wireless network and will continue to have email service. Network computer service will be restored sometime on Friday, depending on the speed of the movers.
• Our plan is for staff to be in their offices, and for operations to be back to normal, by Monday morning. At that time, we will stop using the current Ava Road entrance and begin using the new door from the Ava Road parking lot (just about 25 feet west of the old one), entering into the Boardroom foyer.
• If, during the Thursday-Friday period there is an emergency that requires immediate attention, please call the Temple’s pager at 416-375-6771.

We thank you for your cooperation and patience during this exciting time and regret any inconvenience this may cause. Please stop in and visit us starting next Monday, once we’re settled in our new spaces.

As a reminder, and as we first noted in our mid-December construction update, our Building Committee, with the guidance of our architect and our cost consultant, has reviewed the bids from the six pre-qualified general contractor firms that were bidding to oversee construction of the balance of Phase 1 and has been engaged in a meticulous value-engineering exercise with the contractor that submitted the best bid.  After a couple of months of careful work, this ongoing process is almost finished. Our aim is to reduce the cost of the rest of Phase 1 construction, as the bids came in higher than anticipated, when measured against the estimates prepared by our cost consultant.

Once again, thanks to all for your continued support of our Renewal Project. For the most up to date photos and video of construction in progress, please click here.