Still a Home: Tri-Tech Engineering Helps a Growing Church Expand and Remain a Home

“Home is where the heart is,” so the saying goes. And Centerville Christian Fellowship, in Centerville, Ohio, has a big heart to serve its members and surrounding communities. So, it makes sense that the church began in a home—and its leaders have sought to maintain the same sense of family, safety, and space that a home provides, no matter how large they grow.

After its launch in 1995, CCF quickly grew. They transitioned from meeting in homes to a school building and then to their own facility on purchased property in 2001. Whether they met in a living room, school gym, or a large sanctuary, CCF’s leaders committed themselves to offering a hospitality, safe for all visitors and members. In 2013, CCF leadership saw the church’s number of families and children attendees grow steadily. The church’s facility would soon reach maximum occupancy. So CCF leaders assembled a building committee who began meeting to discuss financially wise, future-oriented plans to ensure they could offer members and visitors the same homely hospitality that has always characterized the church since its first days while also guaranteeing staff and families safety.

After considering many options, CCF leaders decided a facility addition was the best way to meet the facility and familial needs of the church. Safety and space were the leaders’ paramount concerns while the budget remained a primary focus.

Experienced with supplying exceptional engineering-design services while remaining attentive to clients’ budgetary concerns, Tri-Tech Engineering joined the addition build. 

As the building committee lead shared, “Navigating those two commitments would have proved difficult—and intimidating—if it weren’t for the Tri-Tech Engineering team. From the first design meeting, Tri-Tech minimized our committee’s stress level and maximized the addition’s opportunities for our church.”

During the design phase, Tri-Tech’s team met with the owner to clarify and verify the addition’s requirements. Working alongside the project lead, Brentwood Builders, and the project architect, Eller Architecture, Tri-Tech developed designs to meet those various needs.

Tri-Tech’s multidisciplinary team focused their designs on optimizing the equipment for and functions of the building addition. They looked at every possible design opportunity to elevate the project’s overall effectiveness on the client’s budget and efficiency in meeting their requirements for the building addition.

As CCF’s numbers grew through the 2010s, they had to leverage their existing spaces for multiple uses, making it more difficult to keep spaces reserved for single use, and making safety an elevated concern as more people came through various rooms, including rooms next to or used for children’s activities. Tri-Tech’s team worked alongside the project’s architect to design spaces that were spacious and strategically located to ensure optimum safety for the children and quick access for children’s parents to reach them from the sanctuary. These designs also ensured that children-ministry volunteers and staff could maintain clear record of children and families in attendance in the children’s ministry locations.

Tri-Tech’s designs also ensured up-to-date security measures in the children’s area, a private space for nursing mothers, and retractable partitions to turn large spaces into small classrooms on Sunday mornings.

Tri-Tech’s structural engineering included designs for the addition’s foundation, wall, and roof framing. As part of its mechanical designs, multiple pad-mounted HVAC units were installed behind the building for flexible zoning and ease of maintenance.

The electrical design incorporated a new fire-alarm system for the addition, which linked to the principal building’s system, and new electric utility services.

And Tri-Tech’s plumbing designs offered accommodated restrooms with smaller fixtures in children’s areas and increased capacity in the existing building’s bathrooms. For CCF’s existing building, Tri-Tech also renovated the restrooms to bring them to ADA compliance.

The building addition—and the subsequent enhancements to surrounding-space use in the existing building—provided Tri-Tech an opportunity to also improve the existing sanctuary’s capacity. With less pressure on CCF staff and volunteers to use certain spaces for multi-use purposes, Tri-Tech’s structural engineering team facilitated an expansion of CCF’s existing sanctuary, allowing for approximately 110 more seats.

The combination of experience and customer service that Tri-Tech provided with Brentwood and Eller ensured CCF’s leadership they could continue to provide a home away from home for their members and visitors during weekend gatherings. Because of Tri-Tech’s commitment to be “Built on Integrity,” hundreds of visitors who walk through CCF’s doors every weekend can encounter CCF’s heart for belonging that the church has valued since its first days meeting in a home.