Serfass Construction of North Whitehall Township helps build, design Texas project

A Lehigh Valley construction firm is helping a global manufacturer in the oil and gas industry expand its office in Texas. Several other local companies also are playing a role.

Serfass Construction of North Whitehall Township will build a three-story, 30,000-square-foot-office building addition in Houston, Texas, for Greene Tweed and Co., headquartered in Kulpsville, Montgomery County. The company has facilities across Europe, Asia and North America, including the one in Houston.

“They currently have manufacturing; they need more office space for marketing and other professionals,” said Kevin Serfass, vice president of Serfass Construction. The office building will go up alongside the manufacturing space, he said.

Greene Tweed makes seals and gaskets for the aerospace, pharmaceutical/medical and oil and gas industries, Serfass said.

Serfass will break ground next month on the expected 12-month project.

“We are sending management staff down to Houston, and the trade workers are from Houston,” Serfass said. “We’ve been working on pre-construction for the past year.”

This work includes running budgets, performing feasibility studies and value engineering, he said.

Portner and Hetke Architects of Emmaus is the architect for the project and has retained Greene Tweed as a client for 15 years, said Karl Hetke, project architect and vice president of Portner and Hetke.

The project is just outside Houston in an area that has shown a large boom in office building construction, Hetke said.

“We are doing all of the latest, as far as energy efficiency,” he said. “When we got the go ahead in March, we stayed on budget in a timely fashion.”

The budget for the project was about $6.5 million, Hetke said.

The project shows the importance of relationships, Hetke said, noting that a few other local firms also worked on the engineering aspects.

These firms included Van Cleef Engineering Associates of Bethlehem as the civil engineer, Lock Ridge Engineering LLC of Emmaus as the structural engineer and Liberty Engineering Inc. of Fogelsville as the mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection engineers.

Source: LVB.com