Cress presses forward on new building
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FAIRMONT - With its new building project well underway in Fairmont, Cress Refrigeration is working under pressure to ensure everything is ready for winter.
Cress Refrigeration began operations in 1999, providing heating, air conditioning, commercial refrigeration and a little bit of light industrial work for Fairmont and the area surrounding it.
Since it started, co-owner Nick Cress said Cress Refrigeration has grown their customer base and the diversity of the products it offers. Currently, they operate out of 426 Winnebago Avenue.
"We do a lot more restaurant equipment now than we’ve done in the past," he said. "We do a lot more diverse work for single customers. Where we might have taken care of one or two pieces of equipment, we’re starting to take care of all the equipment within their facility."
As such, Cress said space has been an issue since around 2010. The more they looked for solutions, the more they found that building new was the route to go.
"We were finding some buildings, but none were really suitable for the work that we were doing and what we needed in a facility," Cress said. "When it came down to the three options we were recently exploring cost-wise and what we were getting for the cost, new building was the most viable option."
For particulars on why current buildings did not work for their purposes, Cress said a lot of them were set up more for retail.
"They’re all decorated out," he said. "It’s all drywalled. There’s flooring. There’s lower ceiling heights. Here we get to set our ceiling height high enough to allow for our vans to fit inside, allow for more storage height-wise, and then we don’t have to deal with having to remodel an existing facility and have it still not quite meet our needs."
As for why now to make the leap, co-owner Sam Cress said it was for financially stabilizing and growing the business to accomplish this.
"All the pieces really fell into place," Nick said. "We had been exploring this avenue for probably five plus years now, as far as actually building a place. Just in the past year and a half, things fell into place where we started falling more toward this method and this location."
After some issues with the land, 1605 North Bixby Road became theirs, and Cress Refrigeration secured a five-year tax abatement through the city of Fairmont, Martin County and the Fairmont Area School Board.
"We can get a runway to be able to ramp things up and get moved in and settled," Sam said.
The project is scheduled to cost around $1.075 million. With this new building, Nick said it will grant them more space, better organization and the ability to bring trucks inside to load.
"With the smaller space, you wind up stacking stuff in front of stuff and on top of stuff," he said. "Now the part you thought you had is buried, and you’re having to dig it out. You may forget that you have something on hand. Hopefully, having a place for everything and everything in its place will help alleviate some of those inventory issues that we find ourselves having."
They will also be able to add two new positions, one of which will add a full-time bookkeeper to replace their mother Carol Cress.
In a big project like this, Nick said working with local companies, including K&W Electric, Federated Rural Electric and Peymann Plumbing, has been done whenever possible.
"We like to support local, and we also want to pick people that we feel have the most experience in those areas," he said.
Right now, Nick said they are around 25 percent complete with the overall project. So far they have electrical on site, and water and sewer have been bored under the road. A majority of the groundwork is completed and they are now starting to put up posts for the building.
"Our goal is to be fully encapsulated and insulated by snowfall so we can spend the winter doing the interior finishing and electrical and plumbing and heating," he said.
While they are still on track to do so, Sam said they had to wrestle with losing nearly an entire month in September due to wet conditions. Thankfully, they feel they still have a week or two of leeway, and even in the conditions on Tuesday workers were putting up posts for the building.
"They’ll start by getting the rest of the poles up," Nick said. "They’ll probably be putting wood along the poles to get them all straight and in line, and headers over the garage doors. Then the trusses will go up, and at that point, they’ll probably start putting up exterior seal, which will lead to the encapsulation component."
As long as they can get everything ready before winter, the plan is for the building to be completed by Spring 2027.