A Palmerton Area School District weight room and wrestling room project, which was set to go out to bid this week, is headed for a design change after officials recently discovered a water line coming from the high school was smaller than expected.

Michelle Mozingo, senior interior architectural designer with Alloy5, said the line changes somewhere underground from 2 to 1.5 inches, impacting the number of showers the district can add in the facility.

“The drawings we received from the district did not show the change in size,” Mozingo said.

The renovation will include a team locker room for wrestling and separate boys and girls shower facilities, among other improvements. The current building, which hasn’t seen a major update in more than 20 years, has no space for female wrestlers to shower and the layout requires male wrestlers to walk across the weight room before and after showering.

Palmerton directors previously approved drawings showing two locker rooms, around 150 square feet each, and two shower facilities, averaging 255 square feet, each with seven showers.

“The 1.5-inch line will not support the seven showers in each locker room,” Mozingo told the board Tuesday night. “In terms of water pressure, five showers in each would be the best recommendation.”

With the addition of the locker rooms, two existing single use restrooms in the building would be eliminated, which Mozingo said would take some pressure of the infrastructure. An 84-square-foot assisted use bathroom with a shower would also be added during the project.

“To find where the change in size occurs,” Mozingo said, “and make it 2 inches all of the way across would cost exponentially more than the work we’re trying to achieve.”

Plans also now call for hooking on to a “more conveniently located 4-inch sewer line” as opposed to a larger 6-inch line that architects said would have required digging up an existing parking lot.

The new design will be brought back before the board at its Aug. 1 voting meeting, when it plans to vote on rebidding the project.