Walt Disney World is replacing and upgrading all 365 cabins at Fort Wilderness Resort & Campground, a process that’s part assembly line and part intricate dance.
The existing cabins, in place since 1999, are manufactured homes on wheels. They’ll be replaced with permanent structuresthe same size as their predecessors — 504 square feet. The first of the outgoing trailers rolled away this week.
The replacement cabins will be Disney Vacation Club properties, although they will be available to people who are not timeshare owners, too. The average price for the existing cabins has been about $500 per night.
DVC members will be in the first set of new units on July 1. The total project is scheduled to be completed next March.
Disney is tackling the project with innovation and efficiency and minimal disruptions to Fort Wilderness visitors and operations.
The 750-acre resort, which debuted with Disney World in 1971, also hosts RVs, tents and has other recreational activities.
“We’re very close to all of the other occupied areas. It’s not like a new resort where we’re demo-ing the whole site,” said Todd Watzel, manager of programs with Disney’s facility-asset management team, which wrangles WDW renovations. Fort Wilderness has many trees and other natural features that they didn’t want to disturb, he said.
Right now, large portions of the cabins – the walls, floors, roofs – are being built and stored in a warehouse in south Orlando. Those pieces will be moved to the site to be assembled into the new dwellings.
Among the construction challenges are the tight quarters of Fort Wilderness and the placement of the cabins, which are grouped along several tree-lined loops of one-lane roadways.
“We have a very logistic challenge that we’re overcoming by pre-planning,” said Juan Quiroga, CEO and president of JCQ Services, an Orlando-based contractor.
Quiroga and contractor Jeff Friedrich formed J&J Venture Group for the Fort Wilderness project.
“From day one, [we’ve been] trying to figure out how to make this all work and do it in a year,” said Friedrich, owner of Friedrich Watkins Co.
They found efficiencies by working out of the warehouse. A steel-frame machine by FrameCAD takes metal from a spool and creates specified pieces, cut to size, that are part of the cabin walls.
“This thing prints out metal studs. It drills and dimples them. It punches all the holes for all the mechanical and electrical stuff to go through the walls, And it does it with less than 1% waste,” Friedrich said.
Watzel added, “You know things are going to match and mate when all the buildings get put together.”
All 365 new cabins are identical in construction. More than 120 walls are ready in the warehouse. Cabin plans require 14 apiece.
The warehouse is a controlled environment for workers and elbow room.
“You can have 50 people here working on it. You can’t have 50 people working in [a] cabin,” Watzel said during a warehouse tour.
Some painting and woodwork also are done in the manufacturing warehouse, where the air-conditioning units are stored. Furniture and appliances for the new cabins are kept in a different Central Florida warehouse until it’s time for installation.
Building materials will arrive on trucks at the Fort Wilderness loops in the order of assembly, moving around single file, lot by lot, before starting the next cabin on the road. Progress on the cabins will be staggered, with the project done a loop at a time.
“Once you’re about 30 days into it, you could walk that loop and see every single stage of construction of the cabin,” Friedrich said.
Although the new cabins will occupy the exact footprint as the previous models, the look and the floorplan have been updated. The bathroom will occupy the front end of the cabin, nearest the parking space, and the midsection will be a living room/kitchen space looking out onto the deck. The bedroom is in the back with a queen-size bed and bunk beds.
The space previously devoted to a small hallway was given to a vanity sink outside the bathroom. The cabin is designed to sleep six people, thanks to a pull-down bed in the living area.
The 1999 models were all brown and log-inspired on the exterior, but that’s changing.
“The new cabins are going to kind of be skittled with a flavor of a green, a brown, a red – kind of randomly around the loop,” Watzel said.
“It’s a more modern, rustic aesthetic than maybe a log cabin,” he said.
Along with architectural and interior design teams, members of Walt Disney Imagineering have applied touches, leaning into characters such as woodsy Chip ‘n’ Dale characters, who appear as part of the fabric of curtains.
The new cabins have bigger windows, tongue-and-groove wood ceilings and other natural materials.
And they’ll be there to stay.
“Twenty years from now, we will not be putting wheels on these and driving away,” Watzel said. “These are long-term investments.”
dbevil@orlandosentinel.com
