Changes, changes, changes

It has been a long while since we posted a director’s blog, but after some encouragement from people that have actually read it, we decided to resurrect the blog.  Our goal with the blog is to share with you about what is going on at Big Sky Bible Camp and Camp Promise as well as to help you get to know us better.

Keeping our promise…

I would like to give a report from the summer, because we had a great one, but that will have to wait!  This blog will simply be an update about Big Sky’s new facility.  If you are unfamiliar with this project, the campaign is entitled, “A Promise Kept,” as it is our promise to folks with special needs to see this facility through.  We have been quiet about the facility for the summer months, partly because we were just plain busy, but also because we went back to the drawing board in a sense.  My understanding is that this is somewhat of a normal process for a building of this caliber, but after sending our rough design out to some engineers, we realized that there were some aspects of the building that were not going to work well for us.  One element that we were particularly concerned about was the need for many columns in the dining room to support the roof structure of the design.

My (Jamy) supervisor at BCM (our parent organization) happens to be a former architect, so he has spent a lot of time this summer/fall honing the floor plan of the dining room as well as the roof structure, keeping to a maximum of a 60 foot span to allow for wood trusses and to avoid columns.  We rethought many other things as well and we have now resubmitted our ideas and drawings to our architect, Zach George.  He will create an initial set of plans from our drawings and things should move relatively quickly once he is able to resume work on our project. 

We are still planning to begin excavation and foundation work sometime during the spring of 2020.  We have a good chunk of money in the bank that will get us pretty far into the project.  As they become available, we will be updating sketches and drawings of the facility.  Again, much of it has remained the same, but we have changed the overall square footage and slightly altered the design of the dining hall.  Although the drawings are outdated, you can still learn more about this project, titled “A Promise Kept,” at http://bigskybiblecamp.org/apromisekept/.  Thanks for reading!