Home Improvement meets E.R.

Conducting a $50 million renovation in and around a fully functioning hospital is one thing. Doing it in the middle of Bronxville, where tulips, not litter, line the sidewalks, only adds to the equation.

“It”™s very difficult working in the middle of an emergency room,” said Keith Kallmeyer, project senior superintendent for the contractor, Bovis Lend Lease, with an office on Palmer Road in Bronxville. “I usually turn the other way when I see something messy. I”™m not that good with blood.”

Kollmeyer pointed to a locked green fence that circles the construction site: “And we have to respect where we are. This is a lovely town.”

The six-story scaffold visible along Pondfield Road West will become two new elevators, visible outside the building. But in the scheme of a project that began 18 months ago and is slated for completion in 2009, the elevators”™ first job will be to hoist material to the roof as part of the sixth-floor renovation. In conversation, a person notices the word “logistics” is a big part of Kallmeyer”™s workday vocabulary.

Kallmeyer said the project is proceeding “a little slower” than planned. On cue, one of the up-to-20-member crew had no electricity at an outside jack. Kallmeyer assessed the situation and said where a different electric source could be found. “All part of the day,” he said.

Labor foreman Charley Lewis confirmed Kallmeyer”™s take on working in the tight, active and immaculate environs of the hospital: “We sometimes say it”™s easier to build a skyscraper from the ground up than some of these renovations.”

The Bovis crew at Lawrence Hospital is trained for hospital work and is part of the firm”™s health-care division, Kallmeyer said.