When you drive to the 95,000-square-foot store you will notice a new design for a Home Depot. The façade features beautiful brick columns with a stone base, a brick soldier course canopy, highly intricate brickwork at the main entrance and brick cladding with limestone banding vertically and horizontally on the remainder of the building. The back of the store has a self supporting brick wall hiding the truck docking area. As you get very close to the store, you can discover that it is not brick at all; it is insulated precast concrete wall panels.

When Home Depot decided on the site in Fredericton New Brunswick, they listened to the concerns of local people and adopted the design of the store to meet their requirements. The store was created using a look of brick and stone. After numerous consultations with the precast supplier, Home Depot came up with a building layout using Insulated precast concrete wall panels as their choice for the cladding. 243 panels were manufactured using a rubber formliner to create impressions of brick and stone.

Once the casting was complete, the panels were installed quickly in less than 15 days to speed up the overall construction schedule. The self supporting panels at the back of the building are being held in place by cast-in NMB (link to www.splicesleeve.com) rebar splice sleeves. In the spring of 2006 the contractor stained the building to finalize the look of the brick and stone patterns. June 29, 2006 marked the opening of Home Depot’s store in Fredericton.

The distinctive appearance of the Fredericton Home Depot features the brick look of the exterior precast panels. By using a formliner which created the brick imprint and then staining the panel the brick colour. If actual brick was used it would have taken four times as long to enclose the building and delayed the opening by up to two months.

The precast manufacturer took advantage of using 12-foot wide sandwich wall panels that used the same labour force to produce the panel as would be required with an 8-foot wide panel. Also, the same amount of effort is required in the field to lift the panel in place, with 50-per-cent more square footage for about 10 to 15-per-cent more cost.

Home Depot, Canada, has been a valued customer by precast Industry. They see the inherent quality of insulated precast concrete panels and the speed of getting their buildings enclosed quickly.

Credits:
Owner: Home Depot Canada Inc.
Architects: Turner Fleischer Architects Inc. - Halifax, Nova Scotia
Engineer: Leonard Kalismenko & Associates Ltd. - North York, Ontario
Construction Manager: Rideau Construction Inc. - Bedford, Nova Scotia
Precast Supplier: Strescon Limited - Saint John, New Brunswick