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In the Kerns neighborhood the former Davidson Baking Company building, in its heyday, pumped out some 12.5 million bread loaves a year.

On racks that lined corridors, bakery items waited to be loaded onto a fleet of delivery trucks. Women in starched white aprons filled the halls, hunching over tables of cakes, pastries and donuts.

Many decades later, construction workers are preparing the building for entirely different occupants.

“If there was ever an adaptive reuse that would be geared to young entrepreneurs and creatives, we believed it would be this building,” said Jeff Mincheff, a partner of Mincheff & Mincheff Investments LLC. “We think the space is inspiring, and we can see how an agency or creative firm will come in here and this will be the home of their next big idea.”

Mincheff and project partner Don Vallaster – founding partner of Vallaster Corl Architects PC – are renovating the 96-year-old Bakery Building into a creative office and production facility. The building was expanded over 50 years as a patchwork of garages, warehouses and offices that today comprise a full city block at 700 N.E. 22nd Ave. The block’s uniqueness meshes well with modern mandates, they say.

For instance, a massive, center space – the first one preleased – has no windows, but receives natural light from a second-story catwalk along the perimeter. It suited a company that is developing a drone technology to map building exteriors.

“They wanted a space with high enough ceilings where they could test their drones,” Mincheff said.

To reach the point where that opportunity could be presented, Mincheff and Vallaster had to do a lot of work. When they first rolled up their sleeves, the building was marred by substantial industrial shrapnel.

Wooden floors on the second floor were submerged beneath six to eight inches of concrete and tile. Crews jackhammered it out, hoping that the maple flooring was intact. In most places it was – workers who had poured the concrete had put down a layer of plastic first. But other areas – notably those where damp coolers sat for decades – were worse off.

“It was almost like a fire occurred,” Mincheff said of one room. “You could reach down and grab it with your hand, and it would just turn to dust in your fist. That’s how bad it was.”

Today, visible lines between new and old wood flooring show where repairs took place. Mincheff likes the lack of uniformity because of the story it tells.

A different, 9,500-square-foot space on the second floor also has a tale. It sits beneath a massive arched bow-truss ceiling, and once served as a garage. But sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s, the bakery owners lifted the roof and built a second story underneath. Mincheff and Vallaster polished the wooden floors; replaced fogged-up, single-paned windows with similar low-e glass panels; and seismically braced the girders.

“The historical and architectural details are all preserved with a little bit of modern tech to make it more efficient and cost-effective for the tenant,” Mincheff said.

The Bakery Building project is taking place about 20 blocks east of the makeover epicenter in the Central Eastside Industrial District. Nevertheless, demand for creative space is growing, and recent projects like The Ocean and The Bindery are providing momentum in Northeast Portland.

“It’s been on the fringe, but there are all sorts of great things happening on Sandy (Boulevard),” said Josh Bean, a Doug Bean & Associates broker, during an interview in January. “The building has such natural character (that) it lends itself very well to those types of users. I believe there will be demand for the product, especially with the way (the new owners) are going to do it.”

Bean is preleasing the 80,000-square-foot building. The majority of the ground floor is already leased; Old Portland Hardware & Architectural is the anchor tenant. Much of the 40,000-square-foot second floor is up for grabs – so is a 30,000-square-foot building across the street that connects to the main building via an underground tunnel.

Mincheff and Vallaster, via Bakery Blocks LLC, purchased the property in August 2013 for $5.1 million. Mincheff said the total renovation will likely cost approximately $2.3 million; he has a construction loan from Northwest Bank. Vallaster, the architect for the project, also sees it as an opportunity for storytelling.

“There’s a richness to it,” he said. “There are all these sorts of overlays … This building has so much character and you just can’t find that anymore. We’d prefer to be closer in to the Eastside neighborhood, but the character is here, and so I think people will gravitate to that.”