Paint Shop keeps campus fit and trim

Ever wonder what keeps UD running smoothly? Up Close & Personnel profiles the employees who keep UD ticking around the clock throughout the year. This week, the focus is on the Paint Shop.

Mark Mankin and Jim Tiger

3:54 p.m., June 21, 2005--Been thinking about painting your home, but the idea of all the sanding, scraping, covering and climbing involved won’t let you get started?

Imagine then, what it must be like to be responsible for painting the nearly 450 buildings with more than 7 million square feet of space on three UD campuses.

With the average home rated at 2,000 square feet (according to the Virginia Energy Savers Handbook), that means painting the inside and outside of least 3,500 homes on a regular basis.

And, that’s not counting repairing or replacing windows, floor tiles, stair treads and carpeting, or repairing interior and exterior plaster, stone and concrete surfaces, Mark Mankin, assistant manager for Facilities-Structural Services, said.

“We have seven painters, two masons and a glass technician,” Mankin said. “We paint everything from the press boxes at Delaware Stadium to the oars used by the UD rowing team (UD blue of course), and we do it on a 24/7 schedule.”

Painter Ken Milewski (right) supervises student workers (from left) Donald Kotowski, Aman Bizimana and Suzanne Doubet.

For the full-time painters, that means taking on the role of team leaders during the summer to train and direct student workers hired to assist the regular staff in seeing to it that the 73 residence halls on UD’s Newark campus get spruced up with a new coat of paint as often as possible.

“We try to paint the residence halls every four years,” Mankin said. “We hire 25 students each summer. Sometimes they come back to work for us the next summer.”

Jim Tiger, a paint shop employee since 1986, said that, for the most part, summer at UD means just one thing for paint shop staffers--seeing how many residence halls the crews can paint between Commencement and the arrival of residence life student staffers in early August.

“We usually start on the top floor of a residence hall and work our way down,” Tiger said. “The students tape and cover any surface that is not getting painted. When they get a few rooms ahead of us, we start spraying.”

Tiger said student workers can prepare a room for painting in a matter of minutes, and that when painting is finished the students come back to remove the tape and make any needed cleanups.

“They can tape a room in less than 10 minutes,” Tiger said. “It’s not unusual for the crews to go through a few dozen rolls of tape each day.”

Dan Anderson

Ken Milewski, a full-time UD painter for five years, said the paint shop handles a wide range of requests that range from furniture painting to power washing and graffiti removal.

“We do a lot of work for athletics,” Milewski said. “We’ve done locker rooms, the flag pole and goal posts on Tubby Raymond Field, as well as the concession stands and the parking bumpers outside Delaware Stadium.”

Challenges for painters working in both housing and academic areas include getting equipment close to or inside buildings without disrupting the daily routines of students, faculty and staff.

To help things run as smoothly as possible for all parties, cooperation with academic and Residence Life staff is essential, as is working with other shops and Facilities Planning and Construction, Mankin said.

“A lot of departments request our services, and we try to set up a workable schedule that accommodates our customers,” Mankin said. “We also have to work around weather conditions.”

Ed Jenkot

Dan Anderson, a painter I in Facilities and a 17-year UD employee who works mainly on academic buildings, said that while most color schemes are standard fare, there are times when he and his colleagues depart from the usual beiges and browns seen in most UD classrooms and academic buildings.

“On most jobs we use the same colors, but occasionally we do customizing jobs with different colors and patterns,” Anderson said. “An example of this would be the exterior of the Visitors Center on South College Avenue.”

Anderson said the wide variety of tasks and the opportunity to help other shops when needed keeps his job fresh and interesting.

“I like working here because of the challenge. It’s nice to get out of the ordinary routine,” Anderson said. “I like dealing with the UD community and talking with the diverse group of people we have here at UD.”

James Bullen and Ben Cook

When not painting, Anderson is a student of the writing craft and is taking English courses at UD, where he said he gets to do a lot of essay writing.

With thousands of windows of all shapes, sizes and locations on campus, senior glass technician Ed Jenkot’s work may take him from the basement of a residence hall to the 17th floor of Christina West Tower.

“I’ve been here going on 20 years,” Jenkot said. “The hardest windows to replace are those in Purnell Hall and Christiana Towers.”

Besides replacing windows, Jenkot also repairs and replaces floor tiles, stair treads and base cove moldings, as well as carpeting, rubber stair landing pads and rubber floor pads.

“I help the masons when they are short-handed, and I also work with the carpenters and roofers when needed,” Jenkot said.

Ben Cook, a plasterer/mason group leader, and his partner James Bullen, a plasterer/mason, handle service requests that include repairing plaster and drywall surfaces, caulking, and minor repairs of ceramic tiles, brickwork, walkways, stairs and stone surfaces.

Student workers Brent Bobik and Kim Schussler

“There are a lot of older buildings on campus, both academic and housing, and almost all of these have indoor plaster walls and ceilings,” Cook said. “If there is a leak, the other shops are called in to locate and fix that problem. When they are done, we fix the walls and ceilings.”

Cook, a Facilities employee for 18 years, said that working at UD is nice because of the spread-out nature of the campus and the many different tasks his department is called on to perform.

“You get to do something different each day,” Cook said. “Once people come aboard as employees they usually stay here, so you get to build up a camaraderie with your fellow workers.”

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photos by Kathy F. Atkinson and Sarah Simon, AS ‘06

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