It will cost more and take longer to finish the $3.5 million Wescoe Hall addition, after the chancellor took the unusual step of ordering crews to shift their noisy work to night so students and teachers won’t be annoyed by the clamor.

“One morning we had some people doing some drilling and pounding while we were holding classes,” said Chancellor Robert Hemenway, who teaches a class inside Wescoe. “I said ‘they’ve got to find a way to work on the building without disrupting the classroom activity’ … I’m surprised that anyone knew that I’d been involved in telling the workers that they had to stop what they were doing.”

KU hired crews to enclose Wescoe’s southside terrace and convert the area into two floors of office space, adding about 24,000 square feet of interior space.

“We actually had a problem with the noise when classes started and basically shut the contractor down,” said Mark Reiske, KU’s associate director for design and construction management.

Jim Long, vice provost for facilities planning and management, said Wednesday that only the noisy work was halted.

Long said turning to an extended night work schedule was rare for KU.

Students move across the KU campus southwest of Wescoe Hall, which is undergoing construction to make way for a .5 million addition. Construction at Wescoe, which jolted day classes with the sound of jackhammers breaking concrete, was switched to a night schedule.

“We tried to prevent this from happening initially by trying to do the best planning that we could,” he said. “We knew that we were going to do some things that would be noise activity. We tried to get them done in the summer time. It just didn’t work the way we had planned. Nor did it work the way the contractor had planned.”

Long said the project is funded out of the Provost’s Office. KU will tap into the project’s contingency reserve, which has up to $130,000 for unforeseen costs.

The changes will delay the project. It’s now expected to be done in April, about a month later than previously scheduled. And there will be added cost. Crews are paid a premium for working at night.

But how much more will be paid is still uncertain.

A draft change order provided by KU indicated additional costs will exceed $34,000, though the document was not a final one and lacked signatures.

KU is still negotiating the premium it will pay for the night work, Long said.

The changed work schedule brought welcome relief to those who use the building.

KU lecturer Jenny Noyce, who teaches inside Wescoe, recalled the noise at the start of school.

“On the very first day of class, it was so horribly loud that I couldn’t speak to my students,” she said.