Penguin Bookshop

Green FSC Certified Materials Arrive!

We have to be one of the first independent bookstores in the country working to achieve LEED certification. We know that we are the first green commercial building project in Sewickley. The first green materials for the Penguin arrived this Monday from Charlottesville, VA.

Since the truck was too large to enter Sewickley village, we created a staging area nearby and offloaded the roof trusses and floor joists onto smaller trucks.

LEED certification is achieved by meeting LEED requirements for a minimum of 26 points. We obtain one point for our project under the Materials and Resources category by purchasing at least 50% of the wood used in the building that is FSC certified.

FSC is the Forest Stewardship Council that sets standards for wood materials. The wood must follow a specific chain of custody and be harvested from “certified, well-managed forests” (for more information on this international organization, visit www.fscus.org and www.fsc.org ). Later this week, we will be getting another shipment of FSC certified decking and sheathing which will bring our percentage to well over the 50% required. Since all of these materials were also manufactured within 500 miles (Charlottesville is just over 350 miles from Sewickley), they help us to qualify for another LEED point. This Local/Regional Materials point is obtained by utilizing 20% of the cost of building materials and products from within the 500 mile radius of the site.

We are certainly developing an appreciation for the goals of LEED certification and their positive impact on the community. We are also amazed at the level of commitment required, on our part, to source materials and qualified labor and to continue to meet the minimum standards in all areas. This has been an incredible learning process…

Rebuilding Begins

RE-construction of the Penguin is in full swing!  This is a view of the back of the store showing the new brick facade and the cutout for the new two-story window.  Click here to see a previous post with a picture of the same area.  It looks quite different with the roof and back of the building gone.  You can also see the nearly completed elevator shaft that goes from the basement to the second floor (once we have a second floor).  There will be a stair tower between the elevator and the new two-story window.  We are at the point now where the building is literally taking more shape every day!

Green Materials Arriving & TY to Neighbors

We are bringing environmentally responsible green construction materials to Sewickley on March 25th. That is the date that the Nature Neutral company will deliver all the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified wood products for the reconstruction of the Penguin Bookshop. The materials are all made in a way to guarantee the sustainability of our forests for the future. Although these materials are more difficult and expensive to acquire, they are necessary to fulfill our commitment to LEED certification.

We have also gone to great lengths to find brick that matches the original brick façade from the early 1900s. The color and consistency of this brick will restore the historic look of the original building on
Beaver Street and blend well with surrounding buildings.

Everybody involved in this project wants to thank Tom McCargo of Graham Realty for his cooperation as a neighbor of the Penguin Bookshop and for allowing us to stage materials from his nearby property. His generous cooperation is making it much easier for us to complete the project with minimal impact on the community. Thank you Tom!

Leah and Karen Return from Booksellers' School

Last week, we went to an Opening a Bookstore conference In Florida.  The seminar was an intensive week of classes covering everything Bookstore.  Days were spent on marketing, management, financing, purchasing, staffing, store design and much, much more.  With heads spinning, we returned to snowy Sewickley to design and implement a plan to make sure that the Penguin Bookshop is all that everyone dreams it can be and to keep everything moving forward. 

One of the best things that happened at the conference was that we established many valuable professional connections and began friendships with several interesting people from all over the country and even Anguilla in the Caribbean.  There were two women from Kennebunkport, Maine who are on the same time line as we are for opening their store, Kennebooks.  We tried to convince one woman from Florida to come work for the Penguin Bookshop but she has family ties there.  We met outgoing friends from Oklahoma who share the dream of owning their own bookstore.  The class members included a mother and daughter group from Charlottesville, VA who want to open a children's bookstore patterned off the Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis.  There was a woman who just moved with her family to Utah for the outdoor lifestyle, but laments the lack of an independent bookstore.  There was also an ESL teacher from Minneapolis, MN who wished that her international ESL students had a place to buy books in their own languages.  We met a single mother from Portland, OR who wants to open a bookstore for parents to come together to share and connect.  There were many others and it just goes to show that Americans are starting to move away from the big-box stores and are looking for something more personal. 

Thanks to our first commenter Lisa R.  We would love to hear from anyone who wants to give us feed back as we continue this journey.