June 2025 | Mike Brassfield
When Walt Disney World decided to replace all 365 cabins at its Fort Wilderness Resort & Campground in Orlando, it faced some immediate challenges.
First, it wanted the busy and popular 54-year-old resort near the Magic Kingdom theme park to keep operating in full swing while its cabins were being replaced. Second, “we wanted to minimize the disruption to the environment,” says Todd Watzel, manager of programs with Disney’s facility-asset management team. “Fort Wilderness is already a built-out environment with all the tall trees, the natural forest. We didn’t want to go in there with heavy equipment, dig it all up and tear everything down.”
That’s when Disney called Juan Quiroga. The president and CEO of construction firm JCQ Services, Quiroga is an Orlando contractor whom Disney has worked with many times before.
Quiroga came up by his bootstraps. Born in Peru, he moved to the U.S. as a teenager. In high school, he worked cleaning offices with his mother. Later he got a job washing windows on an Orlando high-rise; he was afraid of heights. In 1998, he started his general contracting company and eventually became a preferred contractor for Walt Disney World, working on numerous hotel renovation and remodeling jobs.
For the Fort Wilderness job, Quiroga partnered with another contractor — Jeff Friedrich, owner of Friedrich Watkins Co. Because of the tight quarters at Fort Wilderness, they decided to do most of the work offsite at a warehouse in south Orlando.
“The biggest challenge was building 365 cabins in 365 days,” which is what Disney asked for, Quiroga says. “We knew the only way to achieve that was by using the latest technology and working in a controlled environment. We invested in stateof-the-art technology that’s not commonly used in the U.S.”
In the warehouse, they used a machine from New Zealand called a FrameCAD. After reading design plans from Disney Imagineers, it cut pieces of metal from spools with satisfying accuracy and precision. It used those to fashion the parts of each cabin — 14 wall panels, four floor panels and eight ceiling panels. The technique limited metal waste to less than 1%, which pleased Disney.
“Think of a fancy IKEA package,” Watzel says. “It all comes out in pieces and parts.”
Those pieces were trucked to Fort Wilderness, where cabins are grouped along tree-lined loops with names like Tumbleweed Turn, Hickory Hollow, Cottontail Curl and Possum Path. The old cabins, which were actually manufactured homes on wheels, got towed away, one by one. Crews assembled the new cabins like puzzle pieces onsite.
“They line up on the loop and offload the material, and you put them together,” Watzel says. “The crews just go from one cabin to the next cabin to the next cabin.”
The job was finished in April. The new cabins, which occupy the same footprints as the old ones, sleep six and feel more roomy and airy than their predecessors, with bigger windows.
Quiroga’s company, JCQ Services, has been involved in more than 150,000 hotel room renovations and has significantly scaled up its operations in recent years. This job was different from all the others, though. The biggest challenge was meeting the 365-day schedule despite the tight quarters, remote worksite, labor shortages and weather delays, including from hurricanes Helene and Milton.
Says Quiroga: “This was a one-of-a-kind project.”