The YMCA gym floor was refurbished last week, as Davis Products Company Inc. did the job at no cost to the YMCA.

Besides helping the YMCA, this also serves as a training session.

“I started doing this a long time ago just to help the ‘Y’ out,” Davis Products owner Charlie Weintritt said. “Not long after I started doing it with volunteers, we started turning it into a class where we invite custodians — all of them customers of mine — primarily from the local school districts (some are from Pearl River Community College), and they get hands on experience on how to prepare and how to refinish the gym floor, which is an annual procedure for almost all of the schools. They do this annually.”

Weintritt said the group of about 16 people spent half of Thursday preparing the floor and then they came back Friday morning to apply the varnish.

The whole process takes about 10 to 12 hours, which Weintritt said is a little slower than usual, but that’s because they are teaching as they go.

“Custodians have a lot of skills, but his is one a lot of them don’t have,” Weintritt said. “It’s much more difficult than what they do on their daily routine, so the hands-on part is invaluable. To learn from the experienced people here makes a big difference as far as getting where you don’t make a mess at your gym.

“There are no small mistakes in gym floors. If you make a mistake and you’ve got to start over, it costs you another seven days and this is a very expensive process compared to most of the operations that they do.”

Some of the people helping refurbish the floor attend Pearl River Community College. Marie Bowden is the custodian supervisor in the physical plant at PRCC.

“This is a good experience for us because you’ve got hands-on,” Bowden said. “You can tell them, but hands-on is better to me, in my view. This is a privilege for us to come out and help the children and the YMCA to have it for the kids. Anything we can do volunteer-wise, we try to do on behalf of the college.”