The company is young, but its owner’s wealth of experience is making it a success.
Horizon Interiors LLC was founded by Rudy Kadiric in 2020 in Bloomingdale, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, when the extent of the impact of COVID-19 on the construction industry was still unknown. Kadiric, who had close to 25 years of experience in the wall and ceiling industry, was fortunate that the pandemic struck when it did.
“The company was still in its infancy,” he says, “so I didn’t need to order large amounts of drywall, plywood or other materials that were getting harder to secure.” Horizon’s labor needs, too, were minimal.
While the company has grown since then, Kadiric, who is the founder and principal and has more than 25 years of construction experience, isn’t in a hurry to size up. After operating a large wall and ceiling firm in Michigan years ago with 125 workers, he prefers to remain “small and flexible like a boutique contractor that can take care of all of its clients at any given time.” His work is primarily in the commercial sector where the largest jobs are about $1 million.
“A Perfect Fit”
A mid-size contract for the interior fit-out of a 10,000 square foot sushi restaurant in Skokie, Illinois, last year proved to be foreman Juan Ruiz’s most challenging job in 16 years in the field. The ceiling, in particular, was unusual. Its highlight feature is a wood grill system hung from acoustical ceilings. Ruiz’s crew installed 2 x 2-foot lay-in acoustical ceilings at 12-foot heights in the dining area. A second layer was hung below it.
“We had to make sure that the mains and Ts and everything else were in the right position to hang the wood panels. If we were out by an inch with the acoustical ceilings, it would have been a disaster to try and install it because we couldn’t cut into the wood panels,” he says.
The wood panels were hung from 8-gauge wire and a clip system as specified by the architect and installed in three sections of roughly 10 feet by 30 feet. A fourth section was about 12 by 30 feet. The installation was done on scissor lifts.
Ruiz says mapping out the system first was required to get “a perfect fit” by the crew of four. “It was a very complicated job.”
The job foreman says another hurdle at the restaurant was the assembly and installation of a metal soffit extending roughly 26 feet across the center of the dining room space. The 20-gauge, 33 ml soffit carries electronic cables for the “heavily automated” restaurant that features digital menus at each table and a conveyor belt that transports food from the kitchen to customers.
Ruiz’s crew laid out the soffit on the floor and then installed the top track and 16-foot-long metal studs. Conveyor lines were installed under the soffit. “All of our measurements were critical,” he says. “We had to have three soffits in one.” The conveyors and equipment for the restaurant arrived on site in boxes on three semi-trailer truckloads. “It took us quite some time to sort it all out. It wasn’t an easy job but I am willing to learn new things, so I definitely want to do more ceilings like this,” says Ruiz.
The restaurant was Horizon’s first specialty ceiling job. The scope of work also included framing, FRP wall paneling, taping, baseboards, doors, bath fixtures and equipment installation. “I think the most intricate part of this entire project was the fact most of the trades were working on top of each other because of the tight space and the speedy construction schedule,” explains Kadiric, adding that Horizon was required to complete multiple tasks at once, such as assembling the conveyor belt while completing the ceiling. Horizon used a crew of six to complete the job.
Specialty, Custom Ceiling Work
Kadiric says increasingly he is seeing contracts that include specialty or custom ceilings, such as linear metal, wood and baffles. “It probably represents over half of the jobs we see, and it is becoming the norm in many buildings,” he says. Those jobs can be difficult to price because “there are a lot of parts and pieces. I have to take into consideration the risks on something I’m unfamiliar with, and sometimes I have declined to bid on it.”
At press time, Horizon was bidding on a church addition with vaulted linear wood ceilings. To price and prepare his bid, he spent a lot of time reviewing the architect’s specifications. While skilled trades are in short supply in Chicago, Kadiric has a handful of journeyperson carpenters who can usually solve the challenges of complex ceilings.
The contractor’s biggest job to date is at a KIA dealership in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles. Horizon is installing “highlight” products like ceiling panels with a wood-like finish and seamless panels. But it is Horizon’s work on the exterior of the 53,000-square-foot dealership that presents the biggest challenge. The job calls for exterior cold-formed steel framing with 8-inch studs for the 36-foot high off-angle walls. “We have to work with the structural engineer to make it happen,” says Kadiric.
Project supervisor Luis Covarrubias points out that instead of using 16-gauge metal framing as is the case on conventional building exteriors, Horizon requires 12-gauge, 40ml metal for headers to support the loads for the dealership’s garage doors, and also above showroom window openings as the glazing will be set in place at off-angles.
The “extremely heavy gauge” metal exterior framing is fastened with 1 1/4-inch pins using a gas-actuated nailer. “We require a lot of extra supports on this job,” explains Covarrubias.
“Probably 15 years ago this would be a conventional square building but things (designs) are changing,” points out Kadiric. “We’re seeing walls 15- and 16-feet high, and in some cases even 30-plus-feet high in dealership showrooms. It’s definitely more work for us, and we have to adjust to it.”
The scope of work at KIA also includes waterproofing, interior drywall, doors, frames and hardware. “It’s the biggest job we have had,” he says, adding his crew should peak at 20 or so this summer with the job’s completion set for early fall.
Covarrubias adds that working with mechanical and electrical trades at the big job will require “serious coordination” for work flow to minimize delays. “It’s all about communication from the start,” he says, “knowing where the other trades are working, what direction they are going so we can work together.”
The “compressed schedule” isn’t making it easier. “We are almost working side by side with structural steel erectors,” says Kadiric. “To account for safety, we have spotters on-site to make sure that at the end of the day everybody is safe and goes home. Doing a building from scratch like this is not something we have done before.”
Another Horizon contract in suburban Chicago is a 28,000 square foot supermarket retrofit and addition that features 2 x 2 perforated metal ceilings. Working to a tight timeline, Horizon Interiors will be retrofitting a space that previously housed several retail shops and stores in various configurations. “In some stores you had ceilings at about 30 feet and others maybe at 12 feet,” says Covarrubias. Before the contractor starts ceiling installation, the concrete walls in each store will have to be rebuilt to a common height. Horizon’s contract also calls for exterior cold formed metal framing, FRP wall protection panels and some yet to be known specialty ceilings.
Covarrubias, who has been in the industry for 20 years, says new equipment, technology and materials “are changing the way things are built” and opening up interior spaces to “new challenges for our field.”
On the business side, Horizon uses WorkMax, a web-based resource management platform to manage its projects. “Very quickly we can approve issues, budgets, address safety or compliance issues,” says Kadiric.
The software is loaded onto each employee’s cellphone or iPad to track what they are doing at a given time, helping Horizon to better manage a job and ultimately keep tabs on costs, adds Covarrubias. “At one point I was supervising 12 jobs,” he says, “and doing that with this program has made my job easier.”
And these days, anything that can make a job easier and smoother is welcome.
Don Procter is a freelance writer in Ontario, Canada.
